[oe] Syntax of ASSUME_PROVIDED

[Andreas Oberritter]

Hi all,

I observed some unexpected behavior with BitBake 1.10.1.

After having added ASSUME_PROVIDED += "gconf" to my distro conf, bitbake
pixman didn't succeed anymore (a clean build after removing tmp). It
couldn't find pkgconfig macros used by configure. When I tried bitbake
pkgconfig-native, BitBake looped forever, as Khem already reported in an
earlier mail to bitbake-dev [1].

I noticed that gconf is part of pk-gconf-ig, so I suspected that there
was something going wrong matching the strings.

BitBake uses re_match_strings, which contains the following code:

    for name in strings:
        if (name==target or
                re.search(name,target)!=None):
            return True
    return False

Looking at other occurences of ASSUME_PROVIDED, I noticed that everybody
seems to assume that the syntax for this variable is a space-separated
list of targets, and nobody uses regular expressions for it.

So, should I use something like "^gconf$" in my config? Or should
re_match_strings be modified instead?

Regards,
Andreas

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/bitbake-dev@lists.berlios.de/msg00736.html