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

[mark gross]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 05:25:58PM +0100, Richard Purdie 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.

Well perhaps it would be easier to build a list of packages that have
been skipped?  I think the cache knows about them.  Perhaps they could
be reported to a "skipped" file or something similar?

--mark