[Buildroot] Allowing to build from Git branches

Thomas Petazzoni thomas.petazzoni at bootlin.com
Wed Jan 15 08:00:44 UTC 2020


Hello Chris,

On Wed, 15 Jan 2020 20:07:29 +1300
Chris Packham <judge.packham at gmail.com> wrote:

> > However, over time, I have seen a number of users/companies complaining
> > about this, both on the mailing list and privately with customers or
> > while discussing with users at conferences.
> 
> Yep I'm one of those users.

And you're not the only one :-)

> I'd qualify that reproducibility is good but we also want correct builds.
> 
> A frustration for us (bear in mind this was ~2010) was that it was often
> hit and miss between whether buildroot would pick up the fact that the
> source had changed so we were constantly second-guessing the validity of
> tests which led to a lot of make <package>-dirclean.

I don't really understand how it can be "hit and miss". The way
Buildroot downloads from the upstream location for each package is
completely deterministic.

In addition, if you were doing <package>-dirclean to avoid the problem,
then we're not talking about the same issue, because <package>-dirclean
has zero impact on the contents of DL_DIR, and therefore zero impact on
whether Buildroot will re-download things or not.

Perhaps your issue was broader in the sense that you wanted an existing
Buildroot build (where all packages have already been built) to
automatically refetch some of the packages from Git, without having to
do a "make clean". And that is why you had to selectively "make
<package>-dirclean" those packages.

However, what I am proposing is not going that far. All what I'm
proposing is that if you're doing a clean build, if a package points to
a Git branch as an upstream source, then Buildroot would re-fetch from
that Git branch rather than using a locally cached tarball in DL_DIR
potentially corresponding to an older version of that Git branch.

> > So I'd like to start the debate on whether it might makes sense to
> > relax our requirements on this, and be more pragmatic, and support
> > fetching from Git branches. Of course, this very likely needs to be
> > guarded by a Config.in option, so that we clearly set the boundary
> > between "you're in the safe zone where your build is reproducible" and
> > "you're in the zone where your build is non-reproducible".
> 
> As you've hinted at it should be possible to at least track the git
> describe --always --dirty (or hg equivalent) to provide some level of
> traceability even if it's not complete binary equvialence.

Yes, absolutely. In fact, automatically refetching branches is in some
sense more reproducible than when OVERRIDE_SRCDIR / SITE_METHOD = local
are used.

Indeed, when a package points to a branch, you can at least save the
Git commit which was pointed by the branch at the moment of the build,
and save that somewhere, allowing you to reproduce the same build later
if you need to. However a source directory used with OVERRIDE_SRCDIR /
SITE_METHOD = local can contain any random changes that Buildroot can't
track at all.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com


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