Aargh, accidently hit enter, anyway here is the description. Also not sure if this belongs in the bitbake section but didn't know about a better place. I bumped into a recipe that generated multiple packages. In the FILES_xyz for one of the packages there was a typo (/ missing after ${sbindir} ). bitbake silently skipped the files and packed the file in the base package (so in FILES). It would have been nice if it had barfed that it could not find/package one of the files mentioned in FILES_xyz.
This isn't practical since we have default FILES expressions which don't always match any files. I'm therefore not sure how we can reasonably fix this?
I understand there are default expressions for FILES that will not always match. However for user specified files there should (imho) be a match. I see several ways to fix this. To give a few: split files into two, say IFILES for the internal default FILES and FILES for the ones in the recipe. FILES is then checked for presentness, after that IFILES and FILES are merged and used as today. or Use an indicator in the file spec in FILES that there does not need to be a match. E.g. by prefixing or postfixing the file spec or require only matches for file specs without wildcards. or maybe even compare the entries in FILES with a whitelist variable containing entries that can be there but do not need to have a match (and ideally I would expect that every entry that a user specified in FILES should result in a match).
I can't see anyone wanting to split FILES into two components, we just don't have the time/resources or interest to do that. I'm therefore not sure we can practically do this. What would be nice would be a graphical representation of the packaging process in something like toaster but equally, that is also under resources right now.