[Buildroot] [PATCH 0/3 v2] support/download: enhance svn backend

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello Yann,

On Tue, 1 Aug 2023 15:11:14 +0200
yann.morin at orange.com wrote:

> Yann E. MORIN (3):
>       support/download: fix shellcheck errors in svn backend
>       support/download: use svn credentials to retrieve revision date
>       support/download: add support to exclude svn externals

I have applied the series to next. As reported on IRC, the From: field
is not correct, as it is just From: yann.morin at orange.com, while it
should be From: Yann E. MORIN <yann.morin at orange.com> to match the
Signed-off-by value. I fixed that up when applying.

Another aspect I'd like to challenge though is your decision in PATCH
3/3 to preserve the current behavior of downloading externals as the
default. We have only one package in the tree that uses SVN as far as I
can see, so it would be easy to verify if this one uses external or
not, and do the right thing.

Yes, I know this change of the default behavior could break external
packages, but we were just discussing about switching the default CMake
backend from Makefile to Ninja once all packages in the tree have been
verified: if we following the same reasoning, we should also forever
preserve Makefile as the default CMake backend to not break external
packages.

I think we need to find the right balance between preserving backward
compatibility and moving forward with "better" solutions. I believe the
chances of having people having external packages *and* packages that
use external SVN repositories are fairly slim, so I would think that
defaulting to *not* downloading the SVN externals would be an
acceptable change. We can always mention it in the migration guidelines
at
https://buildroot.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#migrating-from-ol-versions
if we want to be extra nice.

What do you think?

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, co-owner and CEO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering and training
https://bootlin.com