Hi,

I am doing further development on Isar for several months now. This work 
was done on behalf of Siemens for creating reproducible images.
There are several new features, I have implemented and maybe you are 
interested in a few of them.
The main new features are:

* Running chroot tasks and define them as simple bitbake shell tasks:
Defining bitbake tasks, which should run as chroot tasks, offers the 
advantage of -append and -prepend those tasks in different layers, and 
therefore
offers much more flexibility and modularity.

* Debianizing of non debian-compatible source code repositories:
Since Isar follows the strategy, to only produce deb packages, source code 
which is not debian compatible but should also be able to build, must first 
be debianized.
The main work is done within the debianize.bbclass.
After inheriting the debianize class you can define (by overwriting the 
tasks defined in debianize.bbclass) simple makefile tasks within your 
recipe.
Those tasks are parsed and bitbake will then create the required debian 
rules makefile.
This also gives the possibility of layering/overwriting those tasks within 
other layers.

* Cross compile support:
This feature is not completely finished yet and the implementation might 
change in the future.
The idea is very similar to the isar's *-dpkg-cross branch. But there are 
some problems we discovered, so there has to be a more generic and proper 
way of
cross compile packages.
A third buildchroot (cross-buildchroot) is created, and source code is 
build with the cross compiler within.
I think this feature is very important, since qemu user emulation suffers 
under very poor performance and slows down development progress a lot.

The following repositories are available on github now:
https://github.com/benbrenson/isar.git
https://github.com/benbrenson/meta-amazon.git
https://github.com/benbrenson/meta-sunxi.git
https://github.com/benbrenson/meta-swupdate.git
https://github.com/benbrenson/meta-unittest.git (refers to company internal 
repositories, which are not open source yet)

For now, only the isar repository itself is better documented. The 
user_manual.md was therefore modified.

TODOS:
* Add support for incremental builds
* Cache debian binaries for creating reproducible images, with persistent 
versions of all packages (I saw, there is already discussion about that on 
this forum).
* Add support for more hardware (rpi, beagle bone, i.MX6 platforms, odroid, 
allwinner platforms etc.)
* Add support for qemu images (not tested on isar fork, yet)

The main cause, why I'm writing so late, is just because we have been 
waiting until the customer gave the permissions for releasing this project 
on github.

Regards
Benedikt