[yocto] Bitbake problems recognizing the latest version of a repo

[Jakob Hasse]

Hi Paul,

thanks a lot for the clarification. Now I know much better what to 
expect. The pulling from the repository seems to work fine after I set the

SRCREV = "${AUTOREV}" variable.

That seems to have been the mistake causing most of the confusion.

If I encounter unexpected behavior with the locally kept repositories, I 
will come back to the mailing list (maybe it was just my confusion about 
all the revision juggling which let me believe, that building an 
EXTERNAL_SRC repo also does not work as expected).

All the Best and Thanks again,
Jakob

On 04.04.2018 06:13, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> Hi Jakob,
>
> On Thursday, 29 March 2018 12:41:33 AM NZST Jakob Hasse wrote:
>> Right now it's still a mystery for me when bitbake builds the latest
>> version of a repository and why. I make changes in my code and whether I
>> commit them or not, sometimes bitbake builds a package with the recent
>> version, sometimes with an old version.
>> So my strategy is doing mock changes (adding whitespaces, "enhencing"
>> documentation) and adding signed commits as well as forcing a PR in the
>> recipe and re-running bitbake until it works somehow (I heard the
>> bitbake prefers the signed commits somehow could not verify this yet).
>>
>> Hence, I would like to know what I have to do to build only the latest
>> version of a repository...
>> 1. When it's local on my computer (with EXTERNALSRC_BUILD_pn-<package> =
>> "/home/some/local/location/" in local.conf),
> If you are using the externalsrc class (specifically with EXTERNALSRC set,
> since EXTERNALSRC_BUILD only controls where the build is actually run) then
> you should find that any change to files within the source tree should trigger
> do_compile to rerun next time you build the recipe. If that does not happen
> then that's a bug which we should explore further.
>
>> 2. When I build from a github or any remote repository.
> In this case you need to be pulling the latest revision:
>
> SRCREV = "${AUTOREV}"
>
> If you need to specify a branch other than master, use ;branch=branchname in
> SRC_URI.
>
> In order to force it to rebuild the latest version every time however, you
> will likely also need something like this:
>
> PV = "1.0+git${SRCPV}"
>
> The "1.0" bit can be anything you like - usually it would be whatever the
> latest release version was prior to the commit. A couple of further notes:
>
> 1) The result of the above will be that every time you run a build, even if
> the recipe in question is not being built, bitbake will need to query the
> remote repository in order to determine the latest available version.
>
> 2) If you want to ensure that PV never appears to go backwards (which is
> important if you are using package management to perform upgrades within the
> target image) then you will need to enable the PR server - see the manual for
> information on how to do this.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul
>