Bookmark your .repo workspace (Android/YOCTO)

Purpose

Provide an easier way to navigate a workspace created with repo than using cd.

The available tools to navigate quickly around the commands line are scripts that set CDPATH and autojump (and z and v and fasd etc). Both are great but their usability in specific use case can be bested.

In CDPATH if two directories contain a sub-directory of the same name the one first in CDPATH will always be chosen. This is a no-go when frequently going to many directories named "scripts".

Autojump is not predictable enough to make use of it in scripts. There is also the fact that there can be multiple workspaces and autojump can jump into the wrong one. The solution to that is to use jc but that would require one to be in workspace root when calling it.

Design

Idea

General

This tool guesses the root of a workspace by looking for .repo and than based on it's location jumps to a bookmark that is defined as a key: value pair. The key being the name and the value being a path relative to the workspace root.

This is predictable since a workspace only has one .repo directory. It allows to have two or more directories of the same name but different paths to be bookmarked and will always jump the correct directory inside the currently used workspace regardless of where inside the workspace the caller is.

Multiple repo workspaces in one actual workspace

In pathological cases there can be multiple .repo directories in a workspace. For such situations you can override the default behavior and instead of looking for '.repo' make the tool look for a custom 'WORKSPACE_BOOKMARK_MAGIC_FILE' with:

export WORKSPACE_BOOKMARK_MAGIC_FILE='.wsmagic'

It may happen that there is a need to switch between a typical repo workspace and a pathological but similar looking workspace layout frequently. For example a regular workspace layout may look like this:

.
├── .repo
├── android
│   └── vendor
└── poky
    └── build

The pathological workspace may look like this:

.
├── .wsmagic
├── case1
|   ├── .repo
│   ├── android
│   │   └── vendor
│   └── poky
│       └── build
└── case2
    ├── .repo
    ├── android
    └── poky
        └── build

One way to deal with this minor divergence is to introduce optional path elements. With this the same WORKSPACE_BOOKMARKS dict may be used for the pathological and non-pathological case.

export WORKSPACE_BOOKMARKS='{
  "build": "{case2/}poky/build",
  "vendor": "{case1/}android/vendor",
  "repo": ".repo"
}'

Using the WORKSPACE_BOOKMARKS from above for a regular workspace we would get:

cwd	bookmark	new cwd
root	build	poky/build
root	vendor	android/vendor
root	repo	.repo

For a pathological workspace we would get:

cwd	bookmark	new cwd
root	build	case2/poky/build
root	vendor	case1/android/vendor
case1/poky/build	repo	case1/.repo

Note how in case of ambiguous locations (to .repo for example) the tool picks the one closer to the current location.

Code

The tool is separated into two parts:

• g - the tool which calls cd
• workspace_bookmarks.py - the tool which provides an absolute path to jump to

For a workspace:

outside
└── magic_ws
    ├── repo_ws_1
    │   ├── android
    │   │   └── vendor
    │   ├── poky
    │   │   └── build
    │   └── .repo
    ├── repo_ws_2
    │   ├── android
    │   ├── poky
    │   │   └── build
    │   └── .repo
    └── .wsmagic

The tool must understand both "current" and "target" locations which cross .repo workspace boundaries but remain in "magic" workspace bounds.

Usage

Things to put into your .bashrc or .zshrc:

source /path/to/setup.sh
export WORKSPACE_BOOKMARKS='{
  "build": "poky/build",
  "android": "android",
  "manifest": ".repo/manifests"
}'

Things to use daily:

cd some_workspace # with a .repo directory
some_workspace $ g manifest
some_workspace/.repo/manifests $ g android
some_workspace/android $ g
some_workspace $ g build
some_workspace/poky/build $ g android
some_workspace/android $ g poky/build # you can append paths relative to bookmark
some_workspace/poky/build $