[yocto] Can Yocto treat layers like an external package?

[Koehler, Yannick (HPN Aruba)]

In our development with Yocto, we use vendor provided layers.  At this time we have to pull those manually (using git or submodule or other technics) to get the vendor layer on disk before bitbake can start.  Does Yocto allow to automatically pull a yocto layer given a uri, branch and other information, similar way as it can pull the source of a package?

This way, we could omit the vendor layer stuff from our git and instead have Yocto fetch the layer from its source (honoring all the premirror and mirror stuff).  The layer specification would be similar to SRC_URI format with an additional parameter to indicate locally where to put the files, maybe with a default of vendor/<layer-name> structure?

	git://git@mylayer.company.com/layer-name.git;protocol=ssh;branch=master

This would pull into 

	vendors/layer-name

Prior to parse all reccipes?

--
Yannick Koehler