[OE-core] Tell me your build error message annoyances!

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2011-06-01 at 16:06 +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-05-31 at 15:26 -0700, Scott Garman wrote:
> > I'd like to collect some feedback on error messages while building that 
> > you find confusing/annoying/unhelpful. I'm going to be working on trying 
> > to improve the situation and would like to hear from you about what 
> > could be more helpful.
> 
> Funnily enough we were just having a discussion about this on irc.  My
> personal top two least favourite diagnostics are:
> 
> a) "bitbake -b nonexistent-file" gives ten lines of so of python
> exception traceback and then prints "MultipleMatches".
> 
> b) "bitbake -b recipe.bb", with a recipe that skips (due to an
> inCOMPATIBLE_MACHINE or whatever) gives the traditional ten lines of
> traceback spew and then prints "TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not
> iterable".
> 
> This is with bitbake 1.13.0.

Agreed, these are issues.

I'd like to highlight that there is an underlying design issue in
bitbake which make these hard issues to fix. Its very hard for bitbake
to work out when it needs to show the traceback and when it doesn't.

If the user has been given an explanation of the problem we shouldn't
show the traceback but its hard to know that is the case.

Somehow we therefore need to improve the error infrastructure in bitbake
to be able to tell the difference between an unexpected error where a
traceback is useful and a known error which has been explained to the
user and no traceback is required.

Cheers,

Richard