[Buildroot] [PATCH 0/5] Introduce alternative archive format

[Yann E. MORIN]

Jérôme, Thomas, All,

On 2015-11-19 13:02 +0100, Thomas Petazzoni spake thusly:
> On Thu, 19 Nov 2015 11:36:01 +0100, Jérôme Pouiller wrote:
> > As suggested by Arnout [1], this series provide an alternative archive
> > format. This new format contains a shallowed version of upstream
> > repository. This format is a little bigger and a little longer to
> > create but it allow a better workflow with upstream. I describe some
> > good practice in patch 2.
> > 
> > Notice projects hosted by github don't yet benefit of this feature
> > since I have not found any elegant way to do it :-(. 
> > 
> > During my tests, I have noticed current shallow clone is mostly broken
> > (at least with git < 2.5 [2]). Indeed, shallow clone only work with
> > symbolic references (HEAD, a tag or a branch). However, we avoid use of
> > symbolic references in VERSION.
> 
> Thanks for this contribution.
> 
> Your justification in PATCH 2 is just "That simplify workflow with
> upstream". However, we already have the <pkg>_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR mechanism
> (and <pkg>_SITE_METHOD = local, which is the same) to specifically
> address this use case.
> 
> The idea with <pkg>_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR is that if you are actively
> developing on a software component, then it should not be Buildroot's
> responsibility to download/extract/patch it, but it should instead use
> a locally available source directory, which is managed completely
> separately from Buildroot. There you can do whatever Git, Subversion or
> Mercurial version control you want, Buildroot will simply rsync to the
> build directory.
> 
> I think doing development in the build directory, as encouraged by your
> patch, is a bad practice. The build directory is a temporary location,
> people should not be encouraged to work from there.
> 
> And I fail to see what your solution brings compared to using
> <pkg>_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR or <pkg>_SITE_METHOD = local. To me, the existing
> solutions are in fact more flexible and don't encourage the practice of
> hacking in the build directory.
> 
> Of course, if there is a specific workflow that you could describe that
> doesn't work with <pkg>_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR, then I'm definitely
> interested, and from this discussion we can decide whether improvements
> to OVERRIDE_SRCDIR are needed, or if a completely different solution is
> needed.

I have to agree with Thomas: we already have one mechanism to do actual
development on packages, and I believe that it is the best we can offer:

  - it is not removed on 'make clean'  (the killing feature for it)

  - it can be managed however the developer wants to  (that too is a
    killing feature)

  - it is not too complex to setup

Also, I believe it covers all use-cases we can imagine.

The one thing that is made a bit more complex is gdb-ing, because path
in the build directory are referenced, rather than in the actual source
dir. IMHO, that's a minor annoyance, and it is easy to mentally match
the former to the latter.

So, except for the first patch which is indeed a nice cleanup, I'm not
too favourable to that series as a whole...

Regards,
Yann E. MORIN.

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