Seperating firmware-utils into seperate repo

[Alberto Bursi]

On 14/03/22 01:56, Joseph Mullally wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> firmware-utils was separated from openwrt.git into its own repository
> a few months ago:
> https://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/firmware-utils.git
> https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/8cc9a74a3f6bf363645efda6db417f8dadd3d844
> 
> If it's going to stay separate, it looks like these changes are still needed?
> - Release branches matching the main openwrt.git repo. (E.g. To
> facilitate firmware bugfixes on older OpenWRT release after any tool
> APIs in /master have changed)
> - A GitHub mirror (like everything here https://openwrt.org/submitting-patches )
> - Update the developer guide with a workflow for adding and testing a
> new device involving changes to firmware-utils.git and openwrt.git.
> (This is tricky. When recently adding a new device, I built the
> changes in openwrt.git once, then manually rebuilt an updated
> firmware-util binary, then rebuilt the openwrt.git firmware image. Is
> there a proper building the main package and changes to package repos
> at the same time? There is also the can of worms w.r.t. people
> submitting changes and testing, likely it will need to be handled with
> 2 concurrent Pull Requests kept open until everything is 100% ready,
> in addition to the committers bump of the firmware-utils dependency).

Most in-house OpenWrt packages are actually stored in their own git 
repo, see https://git.openwrt.org/ down in the 
/project/something_something.git

Afaik a viable strategy for doing development on those packages is doing 
your development as patches that exist in the build system only, which 
is mostly automated with the quilt tool, as explained here 
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/toolchain/use-patches-with-buildsystem

Then when you are ready you need to copy the changes to a clone of the 
tool's git repo and then make proper commits and send them with 
git-email from mailing list.

If you really need to do A LOT of development on those packages you 
probably want to clone the git repo from openwrt server and put it on 
another git server (or in github, which is also a git server) and just 
edit package makefile in the local openwrt build system to use your 
development repo to get that package's source instead.


-Alberto