[yocto] Change in override behavior?

[Gary Thomas]

On 2016-04-29 09:16, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Apr 2016 08:06:16 Gary Thomas wrote:
>> On 2016-04-29 07:08, Paul Eggleton wrote:
>>> On Fri, 29 Apr 2016 06:24:55 Gary Thomas wrote:
>>>> I used to be able to use something like this:
>>>>      VARIABLE = "xyz"
>>>>
>>>> and maybe in a .bbappend use
>>>>
>>>>      VARIABLE_mymachine = "xyzzy"
>>>>
>>>> where 'mymachine' is in OVERRIDES, which resulted in
>>>>
>>>>      VARIABLE = "xyzzy"
>>>>
>>>> This doesn't seem to work the same today, what I get is
>>>>
>>>>      VARIABLE = "xyz"
>>>>      VARIABLE_mymachine = "xyzzy"
>>>>
>>>> Has this changed (recently)?  Why?  How to I make use of overrides?
>>>>
>>>> Note: I'm using the latest Poky master (a9b503b26) updated 2016-04-28
>>>
>>> When you say this is what you're seeing, how are you checking this?
>>> bitbake -e ? Which part of that output are you looking at?
>>>
>>> You *will* now see VARIABLE_mymachine in bitbake -e output even if
>>> "mymachine" is in OVERRIDES - that's because the overridden values stay
>>> in the datastore instead of a "finalisation" step eliminating them, in
>>> order to allow OVERRIDES to be changed dynamically (possibly multiple
>>> times) and still get the datastore contents you expect. That change was
>>> made in the 2.0 release (jethro). However That should not affect the
>>> final value of VARIABLE if "mymachine" is in OVERRIDES however. Are you
>>> sure you are seeing what you think you're seeing? If so, is the bbappend
>>> in fact being applied? Because if what you describe was really happening
>>> then pretty much the entire system would be broken. I just checked a
>>> similar case here and I see the expected results.
>>
>> Yes, I am using 'bitbake -e <recipe> | grep ^VARIABLE' to look at this.
>>
>> In my main recipe, I have this:
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE ?= "${MACHINE}"
>> and my .bbappend for that recipe has these lines:
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE_my-target-A = "something-else1"
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE_my-target-B = "something-else2"
>> and local.conf has
>>     MACHINE="my-target-B"
>>
>> With Yocto 2.0 (Poky ceeb52a2544) I get this:
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE = "something-else2"
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE_my-target-A = "something-else1"
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE_my-target-B = "something-else2"
>>
>> With today's (Poky a9b503b26) I get this:
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE = "my-target-B"
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE_my-target-A = "something-else1"
>>     SOME_OTHER_VARIABLE_my-target-B = "something-else2"
>>
>> I also use this mechanism to set COMPATIBLE_MACHINE a lot and
>> that doesn't seem to be working the same either.
>>
>> Am I doing something incorrectly (and just got away with it for years)?
>>
>> n.b. If you're interested, I can share the .bb/.bbappend files
>> with you privately (I can't put them on the public list)
>
> Ah, one thing... do your machine names have uppercase characters in them (as
> your pseudo-examples above do)? If so that was a 2.1 change; anything that is
> to be used as an override must now be lower case (so DISTRO, MACHINE, etc.)

Indeed, my machine names do have an upper case letter in them.
Any suggestions for how to handle this (short of renaming everything which
would be a HUGE chore)?

-- 
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Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
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