Re: [bitbake-devel] [PATCH 2/2] bitbake-setup: support default source overrides

On Fri, 29 May 2026 at 18:06, Ernest Van Hoecke
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Thanks for your feedback, I understand your concern and was not sure how
> to go about it for that reason.
>
> Yes, that's exactly the issue I'm facing. We would like to have a "dev"
> and "release" setup. My current idea was to have the "dev" setup be the
> default, with all revisions pointing to master/tip of the branch and use
> source-overrides to create a "release" without relying on users to pass
> it correctly.
>
> If users have to pass it on the CLI, it also creates an awkward
> bootstrapping where they first have to check out our registry locally
> before setting up the release build.
>
> And if revisions are tightly specified in the main conf.json, it's also
> less straight forward to update it with the current fixed-revisions
> system.

The overrides system was added for a different use case. We wanted to
support CI systems which need to set up a build from something like a
pull request, where one of the layers needs to come from a developer's
branch, but everything else should remain standard. Another use case,
added a bit later, was to write out fixed revisions override, so that
a build that was set up from a floating revision config, could be
reproduced exactly with specific revisions that were resolved at that
point.

I agree that supporting multiple sets of sources would be useful,
perhaps you could look into adding a "sources-overrides" section into
the json, which would contain multiple sets of overrides (e.g. 'dev',
'release', 'oldrelease'), and then the UI would allow selecting one
interactively or through command line? Unfortunately 'sources' itself
can't be extended like that.

Alex