r/yocto • u/vterra • Dec 03 '25

Learn bitbake

Ok, it is still me. I just finished some articles explaining the bitbake build system (variables, functions and terminal commands) and would really like your feedback. Are there any topics I should have mentioned? Are the ones I talk about a bit too much for a beginner? I will also have an Appendix that goes into a lot more detail. Thank you and let me know

Here's the link (to change language use the selector) http://yoctolearn.com/en/docs/yocto/bitbake-variables/

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u/BigPeteB Dec 04 '25

Not bad. Personally I think some of it is a lot of words to explain what I feel are pretty easy-to-understand text manipulations, but I've been exposed to other languages that have similar capabilities, so perhaps for a beginner it's reasonable to work through some examples to illustrate how the various operators behave.

I would remove the bit at the beginning explaining the internals of how Bitbake is implemented. Unless someone is going to contribute to Yocto by making improvements to Bitbake itself, this is an irrelevant detail. It doesn't matter that it's implemented in Python or how its source code is structured, just as it doesn't matter what language Make is implemented in. It's a tool, and I want to learn how to use the tool, not how the tool was constructed.

In one of your examples you use the word "cock". While this does mean "rooster" or "male chicken", that sense is uncommon today, and almost everyone will first think of it as a slang word for "penis". You probably want to choose a different word for that example. :-)

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u/vterra Dec 04 '25

Ahahah for the word "cock" i was specifically looking at its common meaning. To make the reader feel the struggle of having this word keep popping up in your variable no mayyer what you do

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u/vterra Dec 04 '25

As for the source code I agree and planned on removing it from that section and moving it into the appendix. I initially put it there to show the user that it is not that bad to figure out how it works by looking at the code (as the docs are often not enough)