./meta-yocto/conf/conf-notes.txt and ./meta/conf/conf-notes.txt are identical. It should be possible to inherit the file from oe-core in my opinion if the desired content is the same. This can cause sync overhead, et cetera. If one likes to customize it, it is possible by having that file with a different content, but for the same content, it looks a bit strange a duplication.
The TEMPLATECONF directory is used to contain conf-notes.txt and things like local.conf.sample. It can only be set to one directory so if you change it, you take copies of the set of files. We could add a ton of complexity for fallbacks and so on to remove the file duplication however I think the duplicate file isn't a big issue in this case. In most cases you would want to customise *all* the files. So basically, it doesn't make sense to change this.
> We could add a ton of complexity for fallbacks. It would be literally a few lines in the bash script where it is set up. I am assume it could be done in less than five, eventually. Please let me know why it would not be that simple.
Its adding complexity into a location where I don't believe we want or need it. We try to keep the init scripts as simple and clean as possible. The "poky" case is one of the few cases where a copy of that file makes sense, nearly every other user would modify it. So my answer remains as stated, I don't believe we need or want this.
In fact, this "complexity" is already in there: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/tree/scripts/oe-setup-builddir#n121 So, there would be no any need for the meta-yocto layer to keep it. So, you could either remove that "complexity" (IMHO bad idea), or remove the complexity from the meta-yocto layer.
I was not probably clear, so most of the complexity is already in there, and adding one line allow to remove a whole file in meta-yocto and elsewhere where the users are happy with the default. The required change is basically a one-liner in here: OECORENOTESCONF="$TEMPLATECONF/conf-notes.txt" to: if ! (test -r ""$TEMPLATECONF/conf-notes.txt"); then OECORENOTESCONF="$TEMPLATECONF/conf-notes.txt" or something like that.
Hmm, I cannot still edit comment on bugzilla, so I made a mistake about the negation, so that would not even be needed, so it would be even simpler than my previous one-liner. :-)