[oe] What's with the symlinks?

[Richard Purdie]

On Fri, 2006-12-29 at 11:11 +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> Everywhere I go while assembling my OE build tree, I see admonishments not
> to use a path that has symlinks in it.  For such a major problem, the only
> real information on the actual problem is a fairly cryptic entry in the FAQ,
> about a failure to build libtool-native.
> 
> Being an intensely curious kind of person, and not enjoying arbitrary
> limits, I'm very interested to know what the *real* reason behind being so
> strongly against the much-maligned symlink.  Can anyone enlighten me?

People have explained the reason but you can use paths with symlinks in
*if* you're careful. Basically, you need to ensure the environmental
variables you set use absolute paths without symlinks. My scripts for
setting up build environments make suitable use of "basedir" to ensure
that.

Also, you need to have the conf and tmp directories in the directory
without any symlinks so tmp cannot be a symlink. I'm not entirely sure
why that breaks things but it does.

We should probably patch bitbake to avoid these issues. Patches welcome!

Richard