Bug 16048

Summary: FILESOVERRIDES needs its own comprehensive explanation
Product: [Documentation] Development Manual Reporter: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday>
Component: developmentAssignee: Antonin Godard <antonin.godard>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: Medium CC: tim.orling
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: 6.99   
Hardware: All   
OS: Multiple   
Whiteboard:
OS type for building Yocto: --- Type of Regression: ---
Verified: Documentation change: Yes (doc changes required)

Description Robert P. J. Day 2025-10-30 11:40:02 UTC 
The current explanation of FILESOVERRIDES in the dev manual is simply a line in the "Fetching Code" section -- https://docs.yoctoproject.org/dev-manual/new-recipe.html#fetching-code -- which refers the reader to the reference manual. FILESOVERRIDES is important enough that it merits its own (sub)section, pulling a lot out of the reference manual back into the dev manual.

It should bolster its explanation with an actual example torn from oe-core: formfactor -- https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/tree/meta/recipes-bsp/formfactor -- and it should discuss the behaviour explained by Quentin Schulz in his 2022 presentation (starting at slide 102): https://pretalx.com/media/yocto-project-summit-2022-05/submissions/SCYYWD/resources/Demystifying_the_OVERRIDES_mec_2lZOP
Comment 1 Robert P. J. Day 2025-10-30 11:47:36 UTC 
This improved explanation should show the reader how to display the value of FILESOVERRIDES so they truly appreciate the possibilities:

$ bitbake-getvar FILESOVERRIDES
NOTE: Starting bitbake server...
#
# $FILESOVERRIDES [2 operations]
#   set /home/rpjday/oe/layers/poky/meta/conf/bitbake.conf:807
#     "${TRANSLATED_TARGET_ARCH}:${MACHINEOVERRIDES}:${DISTROOVERRIDES}"
#   set /home/rpjday/oe/layers/poky/meta/conf/documentation.conf:176
#     [doc] "A subset of OVERRIDES used by the OpenEmbedded build system for creating FILESPATH."
# pre-expansion value:
#   "${TRANSLATED_TARGET_ARCH}:${MACHINEOVERRIDES}:${DISTROOVERRIDES}"
FILESOVERRIDES="aarch64:qemuall:aarch64:qemuarm64:poky"