On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 12:19:58PM -0400, Trevor Woerner wrote: > 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…"
I, for one, really like OVERRIDES mechanism! It may not be intuitive at first, but once mastered, it's a very powerful mechanism and, as Chris mentioned, allows doing layered (from generic to specific) alternatives very elegantly. > > > 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. -- Regards, Denys Dmytriyenko <[email protected]> PGP: 0x420902729A92C964 - https://denix.org/0x420902729A92C964 Fingerprint: 25FC E4A5 8A72 2F69 1186 6D76 4209 0272 9A92 C964
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