[linux-yocto] /meta in .gitignore of linux-yocto-3.4/meta (again)

[Jean-François Dagenais]

Hi guys, (Bruce...)

(work with Marc Ferland at Sonatest)

Heads up: I'm a linux-yocto recipe noob. We historically maintained a static
defconfig with a build ready branch on a local repo.

Now moving up to 1.3 and 1.4, we want to use the meta and linux kernel tools.

Checked out a local 'meta' branch that tracks linux-yocto-3.4/meta. I went in to
make a few changes and had problems when trying to commit those (obviously you
might say). The root .gitignore file's last entry is '/meta' which makes any
'git add' of files in the meta dir (the only dir in branch meta) fail.

Now that seemed like an obvious mistake, and sure enough I made a commit which
removes the line '/meta' from the bottom of the file, then added more commits to
my meta branch. I updated the sha-1 in my linux-yocto-3.4.bbappend for my
machine branch and my meta branch. Then built. Note that when I merged
standard/crownbay into my local machine branch, I had a conflict in .gitignore
where I had appended something to the end and crownbay branch was adding '/meta'
to the end also. I merged these changes without too much thinking about it and
my merged version of .gitignore in my machine branch has the '/meta' line second
last in the file... if that's relevant.

Building using bitbake choked in a manner similar to this thread
https://lists.yoctoproject.org/pipermail/yocto/2012-September/011347.html.

Now, even after going through the thread, I still wonder why the meta branch
would have '/meta' at the end of .gitignore... isn't making changes to the meta
dir the purpose of checking out the meta branch? Having the dir ignore makes
committing impossible (unless using 'git add -f'). So what's the reason here?

Thanks for your help!
Cheers.
/jfd