[PSA] Manual update of depot_tools needed if you haven't used/updated it since March 2021

[Josip Sokcevic]

TL;DR If you have a local copy of depot_tools that hasn't been used or updated since March 2021, you need to manually update it.

Hi all,

We moved all repositories to have main as the default branch and we started removing the master branches where possible. depot_tools no longer has it.

If you haven't used gclient, fetch, or update_depot_tools since March 2021, you will need to manually update depot_tools since the update script has "origin/master" hardcoded for checkout, and that will result in a (silent) no-op. We have fixed it in the latest version of depot_tools so this doesn't happen again, but we can't propagate that change to existing copies.

If you need to update your old copy of depot_tools, please run the following commands in depot_tools directory to recover:

git fetch origin main && git rebase FETCH_HEAD && ./update_depot_tools

or simply delete depot_tools and clone it again:

git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git

Anticipated FAQ:

How do I know if I need to update depot_tools?

You can confirm this by checking git-log in depot_tools (see command below). If the latest commit is in April 2021 or later, you don't need to update manually. However, running update commands mentioned above won't do any harm.

git log --since=2021-04-01 -n1 | grep -q . || echo "Needs update."

Why do I need to update depot_tools?

The old version of depot_tools may have bugs that are already fixed. It may not work well with the latest version of chromium/src (see: https://crbug.com/1277136), e.g. you may get an error like this when running "fetch chromium":

________ running 'vpython3 -vpython-spec src/.vpython3 -vpython-tool install' in ...

Error: Command 'vpython3 -vpython-spec src/.vpython3 -vpython-tool install' returned non-zero exit status 1 in /…/src/.gclient-root/chromium

Hook 'vpython3 -vpython-spec src/.vpython3 -vpython-tool install' took 21.71 secs

If you have any questions or concerns, please reply to this email or file a bug using the Infra>SDK component.

Best,

Josip Sokcevic, Chops Source