[oe] RFC: Improve our default conf file setup

[Chris Larson]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Richard Purdie <rpurdie at rpsys.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 11:58 +0100, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
> > Sounds quite nice.
> > Didn't study the class code, but it would be nice if within layer.conf
> > I could use a relative path, which then is turned into an absolute
> > path when the layer.conf file is read
>
> This is what the LAYERDIR variable gives us.
>
> Having relative paths would lose all context outside the layer.conf
> file. We could hardcode a list of variables that needed to be processed
> and so on but LAYERDIR removes all that complexity whilst still letting
> you move things around.
>
> > That means layer.conf can become very standard wrt BBPATH etc. and you
> > can even move layers around.
>
> You should be able to do that with my proposal, the only file that would
> need changing is bblayers.conf, not the layers themselves.
>

Can you explain what the use case is for needing this much control?  I find
it unlikely that it would be problematic to simply add each layer as a full
path to a list of layers in a single file, and leave it at that (i.e.
bblayers.conf).  If site files aren't in the layer, they won't be used.  If
recipes aren't around, they won't be used.  It seems a bit silly if every
layer.conf ends up being a copy of every other layer.conf.  And this sort of
blind copying tends to lead to problems and cruft (just look at distros that
copy angstrom).
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics