There is a usability issue where it can be difficult to understand what settings are available and what the potential system/distro defaults are. Normally, I'd look at the individual package recipes, and potentially the conf/local.conf to try to figure out the system settings. It's not clear on the surface that there are additional configuration settings elsewhere that should NOT be modified by the user, but should be overridden by adding them to conf/local.conf. We need to find a better way to expose this so users can "help themselves" when they don't like the defaults, or perhaps want to change some piece of system behavior.
The solution is probably to slim down the offerings in local.conf and make it clear the defaults come from the distro configuration (i.e. poky.conf).
Several things have changed in the past 4 years: * Better documentation of variables in the manual * local.conf.sample.extended now exists * bitbake -e shows variable history So I think we're good to close this and if there are specific problems, open specific bugs for those.