The bitbake git fetcher currently fetches 'refs/*:refs/*', i.e. every single object in the remote repository. This works poorly with gitlab and github, which use the remote git repository to track its metadata like merge requests, CI pipelines and such. Specifically, gitlab generates refs/merge-requests/*, refs/pipelines/* and refs/keep-around/* and they all contain massive amount of data that are useless for the bitbake build purposes. The amount of useless data can in fact be so massive (e.g. with FDO mesa.git repository) that some proxies may outright terminate the 'git fetch' connection, and make it appear as if bitbake got stuck on 'git fetch' with no output. To avoid fetching all these useless metadata, tweak the git fetcher such that it only fetches refs/heads/* and refs/tags/* . Avoid using negative refspecs as those are only available in new git versions. Per feedback on the ML, Gerrit may push commits outsides of branches or tags during CI runs, which currently works with the 'nobranch=1' fetcher parameter. To retain this functionality, keep fetching everything in case the 'nobranch=1' is present. This still avoids fetching massive amount of data in the common case, since 'nobranch=1' is rare. Update 'nobranch' documentation. Reviewed-by: Peter Kjellerstedt <peter.kjellerstedt@axis.com> (Bitbake rev: d32e5b0ec2ab85ffad7e56ac5b3160860b732556) Signed-off-by: Marek Vasut <marex@denx.de> Signed-off-by: Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com> Signed-off-by: Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>
Bitbake
BitBake is a generic task execution engine that allows shell and Python tasks to be run efficiently and in parallel while working within complex inter-task dependency constraints. One of BitBake's main users, OpenEmbedded, takes this core and builds embedded Linux software stacks using a task-oriented approach.
For information about Bitbake, see the OpenEmbedded website: https://www.openembedded.org/
Bitbake plain documentation can be found under the doc directory or its integrated html version at the Yocto Project website: https://docs.yoctoproject.org
Contributing
Please refer to https://www.openembedded.org/wiki/How_to_submit_a_patch_to_OpenEmbedded for guidelines on how to submit patches, just note that the latter documentation is intended for OpenEmbedded (and its core) not bitbake patches (bitbake-devel@lists.openembedded.org) but in general main guidelines apply. Once the commit(s) have been created, the way to send the patch is through git-send-email. For example, to send the last commit (HEAD) on current branch, type:
git send-email -M -1 --to bitbake-devel@lists.openembedded.org
Mailing list:
https://lists.openembedded.org/g/bitbake-devel
Source code:
https://git.openembedded.org/bitbake/
Testing
Bitbake has a testsuite located in lib/bb/tests/ whichs aim to try and prevent regressions. You can run this with "bitbake-selftest". In particular the fetcher is well covered since it has so many corner cases. The datastore has many tests too. Testing with the testsuite is recommended before submitting patches, particularly to the fetcher and datastore. We also appreciate new test cases and may require them for more obscure issues.
To run the tests "zstd" and "git" must be installed. Git must be correctly configured, in particular the user.email and user.name values must be set.
The assumption is made that this testsuite is run from an initialized OpenEmbedded build
environment (i.e. source oe-init-build-env is used). If this is not the case, run the
testsuite as follows:
export PATH=$(pwd)/bin:$PATH
bin/bitbake-selftest