overuse of bitbake flags considered harmful

overuse of bitbake flags considered harmful

[Phil Blundell]

I was mildly amused to discover, the other day, that the output of
"bitbake -e rpm | grep PACKAGECONFIG" is not quite as one might naïvely
expect.  

I guess the right response to this is perhaps that bitbake ought
nowadays to find some other way to store its own internal state, since
the idiom of using flags is pretty well established in oe-core.

p.

Re: overuse of bitbake flags considered harmful

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2012-09-27 at 13:22 +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
> I was mildly amused to discover, the other day, that the output of
> "bitbake -e rpm | grep PACKAGECONFIG" is not quite as one might naïvely
> expect.  
> 
> I guess the right response to this is perhaps that bitbake ought
> nowadays to find some other way to store its own internal state, since
> the idiom of using flags is pretty well established in oe-core.

For those who don't realise what's going on here, the output is:

python PACKAGECONFIG () {
db bzip2 zlib beecrypt openssl libelf python}

since "python" is a flag bitbake uses to identify python functions too.

I suspect the better solution would be to use "_python" internally since
we already have a convention within bitbake of prefixing internally used
flags with "_".

http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/bitbake/lib/bb/data_smart.py?id=49bc007c80e429090c4db51e30c5ce27e8a72558
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/bitbake/lib/bb/data_smart.py?id=980d658f3f1e6c5b459f741385533a11d35009ca

This would mean the metadata shouldn't use that namespace but I think we
can live with that.

Cheers,

Richard