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

[Chris Larson]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Richard Purdie
<richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 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.

I think we have too many places where exceptions are responded to. If
we pushed the handling up as far as we can, it'd reduce the
duplication of error handling code a great deal.
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics