Develop Revisions: Change Behavior & CLI

[c-bebop]

Old

The current implementation of the develop revisions is however not very intuitive and lacks functionality to actually be able to conveniently develop within multiple repositories, and then test or benchmark the current state within a SimExPal environment.

Therefore, I hereby propose the following functionality change:

SimExPal will first clone and then check out the latest commit present in the given branch provided as the key under build_version for each repository.

The CLI command simex develop --checkout checks the current status of each repository and does the following:

1. If the repository has no local changes: checkout to the given branch and the latest commit (HEAD).
2. If the repository has local changes: disregard local changes and checkout to the given branch and the latest commit (HEAD). The question here is, if it is enough to simply overwrite these changes and not warn the user that data can be lost before executing this command. Therefore, I recommend doing that only if the -f force option is active.

Currently the option simex develop --recheckout offers to simply re-clone the repository including a complete re-build and re-configure step. We could also think of changing this command to simex develop --reclone to have clearly distinguished commands to checkout or actually re-clone repositories.

Update

Our first approach did not succeed and we needed to revert the merge of the feature: #165

The issue is that simexpal writes cache files to the project folders (e.g. checkedout.simexpal and regenerated.simexpal). Those cache files, however, lead to an unclean repository state and a pull or checkout can not simply proceed.

We must therefore first revisit the issue, and first take care of the cache files: #169

• unblock this feature fixing the cache file issue Cache Files #169