Re: tentative list of vars to be dropped from variable glossary

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

On Mon, 2012-03-26 at 12:42 -0700, Rudolf Streif wrote:
> Another variable that seems to be dropped from the latest 1.1.1
> revision of the Reference Manual is BBMASK. In previous versions of
> the manual it was explained that this variable can be used to remove
> packages from images. However, that did not work for me and it did not
> surprise me either. 

BBMASK removes recipes from being parsed. It does not remove them from
images although that would I guess be an indirect result since you could
no longer build them.

> To include a package with an image you will have to make it a
> dependency of that image. If you then hide the recipe of the package
> using BBMASK then you are breaking the dependency and the Bitbake will
> complain with "Nothing provides <package>" because the dependency is
> still there.
>
> I could not think of any other use case for BBMASK in the way it is
> implemented. Are there any?

Its designed so that if you for example didn't care out any *gpe*
recipe, you could exclude them entirely and not even have the parse
overhead.

Its less useful now things are split into layers but nonetheless still
valid syntax.

Cheers,

Richard