[yocto] Badly formatted subpath for git SRC_URI deletes portions of hard drive.

[John Ernberg]

Hi

I was writing a bitbake recipe for a project hosted on a git-server. I 
applied subpath in order to limit the checkout to a specific directory.

When I ran the recipe it failed in do_fetch (or do_unpack) complaining 
about missing files. It had deleted the entire Yocto directory and 
selected directories from my home-dir like ssh-keys, my dir where I keep 
my code, and some configuration files for Thunderbird and my terminal.

Since I had no Yocto directory left I was unable to debug the recipe.

After restoring everything I re-created the recipe, this time I also 
saved a copy of the recipe at a safe location.
At the end of the path given to subpath I had added a '/' as it was not 
specified what the format of the path should be. I figured I would see 
an error if the path was wrong, and technically I did.
Essentially the SRC_URI looked like this:
SRC_URI = "git://git@<server+repo>;protocol=ssh;subpath=path/"

Running the recipe resulted in do_fetch (or do_unpack) failing again and 
complaining about missing files. This time the deletion was on a much 
greater scale, it had deleted so much of my home-dir that my user 
account was rendered entirely useless. The fastest way to recover this 
time was re-installing the machine.

I was keeping bitbake in my home-dir both of these times.

The poky version I am using is Daisy.

Best regards // John Ernberg