972481 - Mirror of Gaia in hg should support git submodules

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[Gareth Aye [:gaye] (back from PTO)]

RelEng currently generates and distributes fxos builds. As part of a larger hygiene effort, we would like to move core Gaia apps into their own repositories and replace them with git submodules. I have heard that RelEng may not support mirroring git submodules to hg for builds. Is this so? If so, can we add support?

Comment 1

[hwine]

This discussion has been had before in bug 883711.

bug 883711 comment 14 on down point to a solution using the common android tool 'repo'.

Could you clarify, (in that bug so we don't break the discussion) why 'repo' is no longer viable, and sub-modules are preferred? Based on that, a list of the impacted continuous integration build and test systems can be constructed to understand the scope of the work you're proposing.

Since gaia already uses 'repo', we know there is no technical barrier (or cost) to using 'repo'.

Note that git and hg do not have a common idea of "sub-module", so sub module usage probably means building only from git, with no conversion to hg. A major impact of that decision would be the lack of git support in tooling used by sheriffs, ateam, and l10n. The l10n process is highly hg-centric. We will need to bring sheriffs & l10n into the discussion early to assess the changes required to their systems.

Comment 2

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

So I did some investigation of using repo with shared libraries in the past, and one thing that did not work was that we would want to be able to include different versions of the library within the same project. Some people said that this was possible, but I did not have luck when I went to implement it. If anyone can prove that it does work I would say repo would work just fine. E.g., we would want to be able to pull in different versions as follows:

gaia/foo/ExternalLib@v1.1/
gaia/bar/ExternalLib@v2.0/

Comment 3

[hwine]

(In reply to Kevin Grandon :kgrandon from comment #2)

I posted that question in bug 883711 comment 22 -- let's keep the 'will repo or submodules be required for gaia restructure' in that bug, and keep this one for the effort to support sub-modules

Comment 4

[hwine]

based on bug 883711 comment 24, it sounds like we are okay with 'repo'. Closing this bug as "incomplete", as there is no current need. If business needs change, please reopen.