On Mon 2021-04-26 @ 11:05:55 AM, Richard Purdie wrote: > On Mon, 2021-04-26 at 11:46 +0200, Quentin Schulz wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I submitted a presentation about OVERRIDES, _append, +=, =. and others > > for YP Summit 2021 in a month. While sharing the description with some > > people in the Yocto community, I've been made aware that I'm missing > > some (history) bits about OVERRIDES. > > > > I've been told that it was added as a temporary measure/hack > > Not sure who told you that but OVERRIDES has been around since bitbake > (then oemake) was split out from openembedded which is probably around 2004.
I'm pretty sure Quentin is referring to me here ;-) and I'll be the first person to tell you that I don't have the best memory going, so I apologize if my poor memory causes a "fake news" incident ;-) But I left that meeting with a very distinct impression that nobody felt that bitbake's OVERRIDE mechanism was one of its best features. I thought the overall feeling was that OVERRIDES was one of the biggest stumbling blocks for newbies. Although I wasn't around when it was added, I seem to think it wasn't feature that was given much thought; there was a need for something, this was proposed, and in it went. Then, some years later, there was a feeling of "if we had known it was going to get this complicated…" > > > and that some had tried to get it removed/reconsidered back in 2015 (been > > given this link: https://www.openembedded.org/wiki/OEDEM_2015#Agenda) but > > it > > was already largely (ab)used? > > Reading that agenda item, I suspect I was the one who added and discussed it > and it was less about removing OVERRIDES and more about considering whether > there was some better operator/format to clearly differentiate between > a variable name and an override. It was a way to see if anyone had ideas, no > great replacement was identified (but was worth asking IMO). I believe we discussed both a square bracket operator and a dot operator. The square brackets were rejected because it was already being used for tasks and PACKAGECONFIGs. Although the dot operator received a lot of support, in the end I thought it came down to the difficulty of how invasive the changeover would be (flag days etc). A good idea, perhaps, but too much inertia otherwise. Thanks for jumping in on this topic, Richard, and filling in the gaps. It's nice to get this sort of information out of peoples' brains an onto paper. Best regards, Trevor
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