Bit-baking with soda

In one of my posts last year I mentioned that one can make automated comments to GitLab very easily with the right tooling - especially if they are coming from linting tools. So any author, reviewer and maintainer gets easy feedback as fast as possible on any proposed changes. This is super easy and very convenient when you're always doing a full build and every possible source in your project is actually checked. Why do we need something new, if that's working so well...? In the bitbake world that is different, we have powerful tools like sstate cache along other mechanisms to avoid exactly building everything from scratch all the time. This makes it tricky to map findings from the meta-sca layer (which fully supports sstate caching) to a pull or merge request, as we never can be sure to have the full picture. Moving from the outside, right into it So it was very clear that the commenting part of a CI pipeline needed to be done with the help of bitbake too... et voila scabot ...

What's the story? I guess most of you are familiar with the concept of merge or pull requests, so I won't go into details on these - but in case you missed it,  here is a brief description what GitLab thinks it is. There are basically two side involved into a merge request (or MR as the cool kids would say;-)) the one who actually provides the code change, lets call them devs the one who's maintaining the repository, where the change should be applied Both sides might have different objectives. The dev wants the code, she/he already wrote (hopefully tested) and streamlined, to be part of the repo upstream - as otherwise she/he could skipped all that work and enjoyed life (something we should all do from time to time). The maintainer usually lacks some implementation detail and is more keen on having the contributed code to be written according to the project style, the code being regression tested, covered by unit tests, so she/he can be sure that the fresh con...