From time to time, bitbake users suggest that bitbake could give better warnings about sytax errors. In practice this is not easy to do and if implemented is suspected to significantly degrade the parser performance. Alexandre Belloni who teaches Yocto to new users tells them that the simply have to memorize which key variables are space separated. We should document this list and explain in the docs that bitbake has limitations (isn't psychic).
Alex, now that you are CCed, can you write a few sentences to get Michael started or to focus the discussion in Thursdays bug review?
IIRC, the discussion ended up with let's document the colon separated lists as most of the lists are space separated. I also replied on bug 13205, I honestly think we should simply close it.
Will go over each variable in the glossary, and make sure that each one that wants a colon separated list is properly documented as such. That's the best solution we found!
Already merged one commit in BitBake: https://git.openembedded.org/bitbake/commit/?id=d1779e2f7789e516efae434b3781c981d0ef4ded And another one submitted for the Yocto Project manuals: https://lore.kernel.org/yocto-docs/20230619161719.910423-1-michael.opdenacker@bootlin.com/T/#t Once the latter is merged, we can close the bug.
Can now close the bug thanks to this commit: https://git.yoctoproject.org/yocto-docs/commit/?id=af5f4bfd213d2678c0f0463ddff321980d6c9669