But that is exactly what we are doing, by integrating the repo fetcher into the yocto workflow, thus improving the yocto tooling :)
Why reinvent the wheel, when you can reuse whats already there? You wouldn't reinvent git just for yocto, would you?
What I mean is that I would try harder to find a workable setup while keeping the recipes for individual items that need to be built.
For instance, devtool is capable of updating source revisions in recipes automatically, it may not work exactly as you want, but that can be fixed.
Yes, repo itself is not proprietary, but your organizational workflow is.
Particularly this:
"if you want to create another version with different cmake flags, you would have to create copies of all 50ish recipes"
looks odd. Why would you make copies? Just set the needed flags with a variable that is set from a global config,
perhaps the distro or local.conf.
Alex