Re: [PATCH 2/3] lib/bb/command.py: ensure setVariable only sets values as strings

[Paul Eggleton <paul.eggleton@linux.intel.com>]

On Tuesday 11 September 2012 15:57:24 Chris Larson wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Paul Eggleton
> <paul.eggleton@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> > This is the interface Hob uses to set variable values in many instances,
> > and at the moment it is possible that some of the values it passes are
> > not strings. If a non-string value gets into the datastore it can
> > trigger exceptions during parsing when we attempt to expand the variable
> > and substitute in the non-string value.
> > 
> > This fixes using the meta-ti layer within Hob - it currently has a
> > reference to BB_NUMBER_THREADS within a shell function and since this
> > is a variable that Hob was setting from its configuration as an integer,
> > due to the above this was triggering an ExpansionError.
> 
> This is probably a good change, but I think that failing expansion due
> to a non-string value is a bad behavior in bitbake. I think it should
> call str() on it as appropriate, as that's the most idiomatic
> solution: Don't check if something is a string, don't require only
> strings, but call str() to get your string

Hmm, I suppose so; I do still worry about existing python code assuming the 
result of getVar() is either None or a string though. Richard tells me that we 
have some non-string values mostly internal to BitBake that are considered 
legal, so that obviously isn't always 100% true, but it's a fair assumption to 
have made for most situations.

Cheers,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre