The simplest possible recipe

["Paul D. DeRocco" <pderocco@ix.netcom.com>]

That would be to copy a single file, provided in the files subdirectory of
the recipe, into a particular place in the target tree. Is there any bbclass
that automates this? Or do I just write a recipe with a do_install function
that executes the "install" command?

My only guide is 5.3.1 in the Development Manual, which performs a simple
compilation, but I'm very hazy about how recipes are interpreted, so I'd
like it if someone can tell me if I've gotten the following stuff right or
not.

SRC_URI tells bitbake what files must be gotten from somewhere and copied
somewhere else in order to carry out the build process. And according to the
Ref Manual, the "file://" prefix tells it to fetch a local file by searching
some directories including the "files" subdirectory next to the .bb file.
And apparently, there is a "subdir" option (whose syntax is unexplained)
which may be used to tell bitbake to put it somewhere specific relative to
${WORKDIR}.

Is the default value of the "subdir" option the S variable? Is that the
purpose of S, to tell bitbake where to put things that it fetches? The Ref
Manual says that S defaults to ${WORKDIR}/${PN}/${PV}, but then the sample
compile recipe sets S to ${WORKDIR}. Is that what one does when one doesn't
need to have a bunch of versioned subdirectories under ${WORKDIR}? (I'm not
sure why one would ever want that, or why that would be the default.)

So if I want to install a file somewhere, do I even need a do_install task,
or can I just set S equal to the desired target location, like
"${etcdir}/foo" and be done with it? Or is that a no-no, and should I always
use do_install?

-- 

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@ix.netcom.com