Re: [bitbake-devel] [PATCH] parse: warn on trailing whitespace after line continuation backslash

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Tue, 2026-08-04 at 11:08 +0200, Jaipaul Cheernam via lists.openembedded.org wrote:
> rstrip() is called before checking for backslash, so trailing spaces or
> tabs after "\" go unnoticed. For example:
> 
>     file://foo.patch \<TAB>
>     file://bar.patch \
> 
> The first line has a trailing tab after the backslash that is invisible
> but ends up in patch context, causing patches to fail to apply on trees
> where it was cleaned up.
> 
> Emit a warning when this is detected so developers can fix it early.
> 
> Tested with bitbake-selftest:
>   $ python3 -m unittest lib.bb.tests.parse.ParseTest.test_parse_trailing_whitespace_continuation -v
>   $ python3 -m unittest lib.bb.tests.parse.ParseTest.test_parse_clean_continuation_no_warning -v
> 
>   2 tests OK
> 
> Signed-off-by: Jaipaul Cheernam <jaipaul.cheernam@est.tech>
> ---
> Problem:
> Ran into this while submitting libssh2 CVE patches to both master and
> wrynose. The libssh2_1.11.1.bb on master has a stray tab after the
> backslash on the CVE-2025-15661-3.patch line. Patches adding new file://
> lines below it applied fine on master but git-am refused them on wrynose
> because that branch doesn't have the trailing tab — context mismatch.

This seems like a lot of code and complexity for what is in reality quite a minor issue which
whilst annoying, doesn't actually break anything?

Cheers,

Richard