[OE-core] purpose of variables like "base_bindir_native"?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm putting together a tutorial on the structure of the native
sysroot and how it's built and variables involved, and was poking
around in both bitbake.conf and native.bbclass, and i'm curious about
one or two things.

  i could be totally wrong but it *seems* like there's native-related
content in bitbake.conf that could be moved over to native.bbclass to
reduce a little of the clutter. i'm perusing bitbake.conf and it's
hard to keep track of some of the variables just because there's both
native- and target- related settings in there. but i'll admit i
haven't finished my inspection.

  on a more specific note, in the entire oe-core layer, there are two
references to the variable "base_bindir_native" (formatted for
aesthetics):

$ grep -rw base_bindir_native *
meta/conf/bitbake.conf:base_bindir_native = "/bin"
meta/conf/bitbake.conf:PATH_prepend =
 "${COREBASE}/scripts:i
 ${STAGING_BINDIR_TOOLCHAIN}:
 ${STAGING_BINDIR_CROSS}:
 ${STAGING_DIR_NATIVE}${sbindir_native}:
 ${STAGING_BINDIR_NATIVE}:
 ${STAGING_DIR_NATIVE}${base_sbindir_native}:
 ${STAGING_DIR_NATIVE}${base_bindir_native}:"      <----- there

  so, given that that variable is set in bitbake.conf, and is only
referenced in that same file, what's the point of making it a
variable? doesn't hurt, of course, but when i see a variable, i
normally assume it's because it might be modified later somewhere, but
i don't see that happening here. is there a reason for it? same thing
could be said for "base_sbindir_native" as well.

  thoughts?

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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