Re: [OE-core] [PATCH] sstate/sstatesig: Abstract dummy package architectures into layer.conf settings

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

On Mon, 2026-03-16 at 13:03 +0000, Peter Kjellerstedt wrote:
> > > Wouldn't it be more appropriate to use += for these two?
> > > Otherwise one will have to use :append to add to them in other
> > > layers.
> > 
> > That depends on whether your layer is included after core or not.
> > I'd have thought including before core would be potentially
> > problematic anyway...
> 
> Sure, but with += the order does not matter.
> 
> We have "meta" as the last layer in BBLAYERS in our setup. E.g., 
> these are the external layers I have in one of our configurations:
> 
> BBLAYERS ?= " \
>   ...
>   .../meta-virtualization \
>   .../meta-webserver \
>   .../meta-multimedia \
>   .../meta-filesystems \
>   .../meta-networking \
>   .../meta-python \
>   .../meta-oe \
>   .../meta-poky \
>   .../meta \
> "
> 
> We have them configured like this to as best as possible match the 
> layer priorities. It is not perfect (e.g., meta-poky prepends to 
> BBPATH instead of appending like all the other layers do), but it 
> has resulted in the least surprises regarding things that are based 
> on BBPATH and things that are based on layer priorities.

We need to rewrite how this all works and remove some of the options as
it is all too complex and everyone is putting it together differently
and hoping for the best :(.

Trying to "support" the number of possible combinations that people
might put things together is problematic. The ask is that everything
works regardless of how you configure it and nobody even
understands/agrees on the basic rules.

If you don't understand my concern, think about how you'd recreate that
setup just starting from core and using bitbake-layers add-layer. I
don't think you can.

It is too late to do anything about it right now and I've put off
trying to improve things as I know the shear amount of complaints I'll
get but there is a problem here.

Cheers,

Richard