On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 10:52 AM Michael Opdenacker via
lists.openembedded.org <michael.opdenacker=
[email protected]> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> Thank you all for your replies and comments!
>
> On 24.02.23 at 00:24, Tom Hochstein wrote:
> > I agree. The problem I have with these variable names is that it's
> ambiguous whether the features will be included or excluded from the
> backfill. All you can tell from the names is that the values were
> 'considered'. What does that mean? You have to go to the manual to find the
> full meaning.
> >
> > What's important about the variables is that they will be 'excluded'
> from the backfill, so this does look much clearer to me:
> >
> >       DISTRO_FEATURES_BACKFILL_EXCLUDED += "some-feature"
>
>
> Richard, would you accept it if I sent a patch replacing
> "BACKFILL_CONSIDERED" by "BACKFILL_EXCLUDED" in the two variables?
>
> Of course, I can understand if that's too late for the next release, and
> instead document this oddity, at least before we can make a change again.
>

Whole BACKFILL mechanism was added for easier backwards compatibility with
existing DISTROs.

Renaming the variable breaks those DISTROs and personally I don't find the
new variables less confusing than the old ones.

I've always read it as: These are the DISTRO_FEATURES which will be
automatically BACKFILLED if you don't do anything and if you notice the
change and CONSIDER them as not wanted, you opt-out by adding them to
BACKFILL_CONSIDERED.

Yes it's confusing, but this whole mechanism wasn't used much, so I'm
surprised a bit that people still have to deal with it.


> >
> > Is there a good reason why we have this separate variable and can't just
> do this?
> >
> >       DISTRO_FEATURES_BACKFILL:remove = "some-feature"
>
>
> Good question. Maybe because ":remove" is final, and cannot be
> overridden, if I understood correctly?
>

IIRC BACKFILL mechanism predates :remove operator by quite a bit.

So BACKFILL wa added as very weak sort-of-append to DISTRO_FEATURES and
BACKFILL_CONSIDERED was to opt-out from it.

Regards,
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