There is demand for the system to be able to fetch layers from remote urls. There has been various discussions on the mailing list of some patches from Jeremy Puhlman although revised versions of these after the discussion were not submitted.
*** Bug 1653 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
To test the feature, I think after the task is finished, we should be able to fetch remote layer and start a build automatically. So I will design such a case in QA test plan. Any comment?
Jiajun - that sounds reasonable; the only issue is the implementation is not set in stone yet, we only have a proof of concept at the moment (which incidentally can be found here: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/log/?h=paule/remotelayers ).
The discussion thread at the time ended up basically that we wanted to keep this as an external executable from bitbake, but could possibly be run by bitbake. I validated the patches posted by Paul has the basic functionality working externally. The patch I proposed made this part of the main cooker startup.
Is this functionality something that can be run from the "bitbake-layers"? If not, that may be the right place to put the initial interaction with the user. Something like bitbake-layers fetch... it would simply iterate through the bblayers and download anything that was missing. (an option to add a fetchall would be nice as well...) ;)
(In reply to comment #5) > Is this functionality something that can be run from the "bitbake-layers"? Paul's implementation places in bitbake-fetchlayers. My original implementation was to fetch the layers when you started up the layer processing during bitbake execution. So I think it really can go in to any location we want.
*** Bug 4147 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This has been dragged from release to release for years now, and for that I apologise. The main reason for that however is I don't think we've converged on how this should actually work in practice. If we can do that then we can move forward, but for now I'm marking this as future.
FYI. At OEDEM (ELC-E) I plan to present a demonstration that may help resolve this. It uses a different workflow, but does address this user experience issue. Also the toaster now helps with some of this as well, the ability to add layers from the layerIndex/remote sites to your projects more easily.
I've started working on a new layers module for bitbake that can help facilitate this.
Mark, Did your work actually resolve this issue?
No. There is no standard way to specify a remote layer and have the system come in and deal with it. Work progressed through the bitbake-layer and layerindex class implementation, but further work on automatic layer setup has halted due to lack of time.
FWIW, we no longer use the remote layering and transitioned over to bitbake-layers a number of years ago. Unless there is someone else looking for this, it might not be worth working on.
bitbake-setup and the layerindex integration in bitbake-layers are the direction that the project decided to go in.