[OE-core] a question about recipe style

[Richard Purdie]

On Tue, 2014-07-08 at 11:34 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   perusing the bitbake user manual, and ran across the section
> discussing the "override style" operators _append, _prepend and
> _remove, and thought i'd go looking through the OE recipes for an
> actual example of the use of "_remove", and the only example i found
> is in meta/recipes-extended/newt, but it looks a bit awkward, so i
> just want to know about recommended style.
> 
>   there are two recipe files there -- libnewt_0.52.17.bb and
> libnewt-python_0.52.17.bb -- with the following structure. that first
> recipe file contains (among other things) the following:
> 
> PACKAGES_prepend = "whiptail "
> ...
> FILES_whiptail = "${bindir}/whiptail"
> 
>   ok, so that recipe defines an additional package, and adds a single
> file to that package, whereupon the second recipe file contains:
> 
> require recipes-extended/newt/libnewt_${PV}.bb
> ...
> PACKAGES_remove = "whiptail"
> 
>   it just seems awkward for recipe 1 to explicitly add a package, only
> for recipe 2 to include that recipe file, and subsequently remove that
> package.
> 
>   it's not a big deal, but from a style perspective, i would have
> thought one would first create a generic libnewt.inc file with common
> content, then define the two recipe files off of that. does that make
> sense in terms of best programming principles?

Yes, it does seem like an odd way to have written the recipes. I'd be
happy enough to see some cleanup patches...

Cheers,

Richard