Re: [docs] [PATCH 3/4] doc: bitbake-user-manual-ref-variables: clarify BBMASK matching patterns

["Antonin Godard" <antonin.godard@bootlin.com>]

Hi,

On Thu Feb 12, 2026 at 12:38 PM CET, Quentin Schulz via lists.yoctoproject.org wrote:
[...]
>> So this looks this is actually what most users want to do, right? Wouldn't it be
>> better to put this forward instead of in a note, say, at the beginning of the
>> definition?
>> 
>> For example, replacing the first example in the variable's definition by:
>> 
>> -The following example uses a complete regular expression to tell
>> -BitBake to ignore all recipe and recipe append files in the
>> -``meta-ti/recipes-misc/`` directory::
>> -
>> -   BBMASK = "meta-ti/recipes-misc/"
>> +The following example uses a complete regular expression to tell BitBake to
>> +ignore all recipe and recipe append files in the ``recipes-misc/`` directory
>> +and subdirectories of the ``meta-ti`` layer::
>> +
>> +   BBMASK = "${BBFILE_PATTERN_meta-ti}/recipes-bsp/"
>> 
>
> Yeah I was conflicted... not sure what's best. This does also rely on 
> BBFILE_PATTERN_meta-ti starting with ^ otherwise we have another 
> potential name clash and we don't actually mention that in the 
> documentation of BBFILE_PATTERN (though it is set like that when 
> creating a layer with bitbake-layers create-layer).
>
> If for some reason you have:
>
> /layers/meta-ti/recipes-bsp
> /downstream/my-layer/appends/layers/meta-ti/recipes-bsp
>
> then both would be matched (I assume, I haven't checked). That is very 
> much a corner case.
>
> I'm also pretty sure nobody actually does that. The only layer I have in 
> my pool of cloned layers which uses BBMASK is meta-lts-mixins and then 
> doesn't even have the layer name in the paths so /me shrugs.
>
>> What do you think?
>> 
>
> We could start with the BBFILE_PATTERN thingy, then explain there are 
> other less restrictive ways to match multiple recipes or directories 
> from different locations later on.

Yes, I think we should do that

Antonin