robotpkg

On Tuesday 30 Oct 2018, at 20:17, Guilhem Saurel wrote:

In our current CI process, we use `make checkout
MASTER_REPOSITORY="dir ${CI_PROJECT_DIR}"` in gitlab-CI with
robotpkg, but this break git (it doesn't consider
robotpkg/$category/$packages/work.$hostname/$distname/.git as a
valid git directory, and use robotpkg/.git instead)

Confirmed: surprisingly, git does not traverse symlinks in the .git
directory. While this makes sense for regular files of the repository,
this sounds like a limitation for the git-dir itself ...

stat("/some/where/.git", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0775, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
lstat("/some/where/.git/HEAD", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777, st_size=..., ...}) = 0
readlink("/some/where/.git/HEAD", "/else/where/.git/HEAD"..., 255) = ...
write(2, "fatal: not a git repository: '/s"...

https://github.com/nim65s/robotpkg/commit/c2dad40d97fad411bac2668127f78f04115d61b2
fixes the issue by avoiding symlink of .git/ files, and instructs
git to use the already available $extract_dir/.git instead

This does probably the trick, however it sounds like a specific and fragile
hack. The 'dir' method of checkout is not supposed to know about git
(or it should know about all the version control systems, and maybe
other weird things ...)

There is the 'git' method already, you could just use it as a
replacement. With CHECKOUT_VCS_OPTS="--depth 1" and the local
MASTER_REPOSITORY it should be more or less equivalement in terms of
disk space and I/O, as git does hardlinks in this situation.

Here are tests:
- without this commit
https://gepgitlab.laas.fr/gsaurel/pinocchio/-/jobs/8350
- with this commit
https://gepgitlab.laas.fr/gsaurel/pinocchio/-/jobs/8349

"error: 'UNKNOWN' was not declared in this scope" sounds like an error
specific to this software. Relying on git is probably a bad idea. For
instance, this will not work either with regular tarballs of the
project.

Relying on git to get the version is probably bad as well: the version
is typically something set in the build system, and should not change
until the next release (while git describe will change it for every
commit). Also, git describe output is not sortable, so you cannot do
version comparison, etc. BTW, this is why the 'checkout version' for a
robotpkg package is computed with the date instead of a
git/cvs/svn/whatever tag.

What you could do instead could be to add a "patchlevel" stuff to the
regular (static) VERSION.MAJOR.MINOR, computed by git describe if you
like, but defaulting to 0 if git does not work for any reason.

My 2c :)