On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 02:29:16PM +0100, Richard Purdie wrote: > I should apologise for being a little grumpy in some of my replies, > it is fair to say that everything is getting to me a little as continual > build failures and being continually asked for reasoned arguments for > saying "no" to things is wearing me down. We have bugs in many core pieces > of the system (pseudo, patchelf, prelink, ltp, oeqa, devtool, eSDK and so > on) and currently it feels like I'm the only person with the domain > knowledge to try and attempt to look into them. This shouldn't ripple > out into emails though. > > The context of this issue is probably important and I didn't really > mention it. > > I've been asked about a "bitbake bug" a lot on irc recently and asked > for help in trying to resolve it. I spent quite a bit more time than > expected (on my weekend) trying to understand the issue and it wasn't > the issue as reported but a lot more subtle. In the emails here I've > spelt out the problem but the way it becomes exposed to the end user > is a lot more insidious. > > I don't think the BSP was doing anything wrong using a MACHINE override > on a variable. The initramfs recipe was also not really doing anything > wrong trying to set the fstypes to the initramfs ones. > > The interaction between the two things is rather unfortunate and in this > case the BSP maintainer could not see why it was breaking and even me, with > a few years experience with bitbake couldn't immediately understand what > was wrong or how my own fix was going to break. > > Even now I think broken "fixes" are being spread around in attempts to try > and work around the issue which swap on machine's breakage for another > (collie works but qemux86 using image-live then doesn't). > > It does worry me a lot that the issue is so obtuse to debug and that whilst > we can patch this one up, someone else can/will hit it again. The potential > to hit it with some other variable also remains. I don't like issues that > few people can "see" into and understand. > > For that reason I would like to change the initramfs recipe somehow to > improve usability and ensure people don't hit this. Right now I can't see > any way to do that other than to say "don't do that". I can't even add > anything to tell the user there is a problem. This was the spirit the > proposal was born from. I understand why people don't like any new operator, > I'm not thrilled either but what I'm not seeing are alternatives to improve > usability :/.
Thanks for all the details here. Since this is stemming from a specific BSP, I think at this point it might be good to share what exactly it is, and it wouldn't be seen as "shaming" that BSP at this point as it's exposed a rather, as you note, obtuse problem. I have another "could we just ..." idea on this, but I could answer that myself maybe with the exact problem laid out. -- Tom
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