I feel it would benefit the Yocto project *tremendously* to have a linter for Bitbake builds. Bitbake is quite liberal in terms of what it will permit recipe/layer authors to do. However, a set of best practices have emerged over the past several years, many of which take the form: "Avoid X." Here are a few such rules I encountered this week:

- In general, avoid override-style removal (i.e., `FOO_remove = ...`), because it's extremely difficult to undo in append recipes. If you must use this syntax, prefer the idiom`FOO_remove = ${FOO_REMOVALS}` so that appends can override the removal.

- Avoid adding extra whitespace when using += and =+
   BAD: FOO += " bar"
  OKAY: FOO += "bar"

- Avoid forgetting to add whitespace when appending via override syntax.
   BAD: FOO_append = "bar"
  OKAY: FOO_append = " bar"

My guess is that core Yocto project contributors can rattle off a few dozen rules like this off the top of their head. And I'm betting that automated checks could be written for many/most of them.