[OE-core] Coordinating inter-layer dependencies

[Andreas Müller]

On Thursday, December 08, 2011 01:17:37 AM Richard Purdie wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-12-01 at 12:23 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> > During the past month there have been a number of updates to OE-core
> > recipes that triggered parsing errors due to bbappend in other layers.
> > A small seleciton:
> > 
> > * netbase
> > * libdrm
> > * xserver-xorg
> > * clutter
> > 
> > My view is that layer maintainers need to keep an eye on potential
> > breakage and have updates ready when patches land into OE-core.
> > Looking back I can see that while the situation is improving a bit,
> > it's still not working. The problem with slow updates to layers is
> > that (with my angstrom hat on) users (and with my TI hat on) customers
> > and coworkers can't do builds without rm'ing the bbappends or
> > disabling the layer.
> 
> I've been thinking about this. I wondered if the notion of wildcards
> for .bbappend might help, e.g. a file called:
> 
> netbase_%.bbappend
> 
> would match all versions of the netbase recipe.
> 
> The % is consistent with PREFERRED_VERSION, I'm a little reluctant to
> use * since its a shell quoting mess.
> 
> It wouldn't be hard to allow bitbake to support this and would solve
> some of the issues we've been having...
> 
If being used in sub layers parse errors (weekend breakers) would turn into

* no issue
* build error

which are both enhancing current situation.

Andreas