[oe] [Bitbake-dev] Add bb.data.flagAppend

[Chris Larson]

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Richard Purdie <rpurdie at rpsys.net> wrote:

> I've been wondering what we could do to get rid of clutter in some of
> our class files. One thing we see a lot of is getting a flag, appending
> to it and saving it again. In normal syntax, =+ works great for this but
> that doesn't help in anonymous python. We see lots of things like:
>
> deps = (bb.data.getVarFlag('do_package_write_ipk', 'depends', d) or
> "").split()
> deps.append('opkg-utils-native:do_populate_sysroot')
> deps.append('virtual/fakeroot-native:do_populate_sysroot')
> bb.data.setVarFlag('do_package_write_ipk', 'depends', " ".join(deps), d)
>
> where as it would be nice just to be able to write:
>
> bb.data.varFlagAppend('do_package_write_ipk', 'depends',
> "opkg-utils-native:do_populate_sysroot
> virtual/fakeroot-native:do_populate_sysroot", d)
>
> or
>
> deps = "opkg-utils-native:do_populate_sysroot
> virtual/fakeroot-native:do_populate_sysroot"
> bb.data.varFlagAppend('do_package_write_ipk', 'depends', deps, d)
>
> if long lines make you uneasy.
>
> Does anyone else feel such a function would be of use? It would assume
> space delimitation as the "=+" and "+=" operators work.
>

This doesn't seem unreasonable to me.  Of course, this sort of thing is
quite common among variables, not just variable flags -- the fetch or "",
split, modify, reset.  Ideally, anything we can do from the metadata (.=,
=., +=, =+, addtask, addhandler, etc) would also be just as easily done via
the python API, to better facilitate testing, and to make things like this a
bit easier.
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics