[bitbake-devel] bblayers.conf is required?

[Chris Larson]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 9:09 AM, Jeremy Puhlman <jpuhlman at mvista.com> wrote:
> On 4/9/2012 11:07 AM, Khem Raj wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 6:03 AM, Gary Thomas <gary at mlbassoc.com> wrote:
>>> The config file conf/bblayers.conf seems to be required:
>>>  $ bitbake core-image-minimal
>>>  Unable to find conf/bblayers.conf
>>>  BitBake must be run from within your build directory: /home/local/p60_poky
>>>
>>> but the bitbake documentation says otherwise:
>>>                <para>BitBake will first search the current working directory
>>> for an optional "conf/bblayers.conf" configuration file. This file is
>>> expected to contain a BBLAYERS variable which is a space delimited list of
>>> 'layer' directories. For each directory in this list, a "conf/layer.conf"
>>> file will be searched for and parsed with the LAYERDIR variable being set to
>>> the directory where the layer was found. The idea is these files will setup
>>> BBPATH and other variables correctly for a given build directory
>>> automatically for the user.</para>
>>>
>>> Maybe the documentation should just read "required" instead of "optional"?
>>
>> I think yes. Next action is a patch or bug report.
>
> Hmmm you used to be able to run bitbake by just setting the BBPATH
> variable in the environment, and not need a bblayers file. It is not the
> suggested use case anymore, but looking at cooker I don't see anything
> in there in the layer handling code that would preclude that use.
>
> Also that final error message comes from the content bitbake script not
> bitbake proper.

Yeah, bitbake itself doesn't require bblayers.conf. If we *were* to
make the layer mechanism required by bitbake, then I'd say we should
implement it properly, rather than being a light convenience wrapper
around the use of BBPATH/BBFILES.
-- 
Christopher Larson