About the external project of sdbusplus in bmcweb

[Lei YU]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 11:55 PM Ed Tanous <ed.tanous at intel.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/11/19 2:29 AM, Lei YU wrote:
> > While I was adding some new function in sdbusplus, it's found that bmcweb is
> > not working correctly, that it always gives errors like below.
> >
> >     Jun 11 09:14:26 romulus bmcweb[1501]: terminate called after
> > throwing an instance of 'sdbusplus::exception::SdBusError'
> >     Jun 11 09:14:26 romulus bmcweb[1501]:   what():  sd_bus_process
> > discard: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Operation not
> > permitted
>
> It should be noted, I am not seeing this behavior in my builds.
>
> >
> > Then it's noticed that bmcweb is using its own revision of sdbusplus during
> > build, as external project in "CMakeLists.txt.in"
>
> https://github.com/openbmc/bmcweb/blob/6ca6ac12e62bd8bfbdb9a24bbfded4a138a1150a/CMakeLists.txt#L9
> https://github.com/openbmc/bmcweb/blob/6ca6ac12e62bd8bfbdb9a24bbfded4a138a1150a/CMakeLists.txt#L142
>
> Notice the YOCTO_DEPENDENCIES option.  When bmcweb is built within yocto
> (which should be a majority of the time), it relies on the sdbusplus
> version that yocto has decided, and ignores its own.  The
> CMakeLists.txt.in is only used when building out of the yocto tree, to
> enable static analysis tools to function without having to static
> analyze the entire codebase.

Thanks for this information, I did not notice that.

> >
> > It's worrying that one should expect that the whole build of OpenBMC should
> > use a single sdbusplus lib defined in
> > meta-phosphor/recipes-extended/sdbusplus/sdbusplus_git.bb, but apparently
> > it's not for bmcweb, and that results in the weird behavior.
>
> See above, my understanding is that bmcweb should be using the single
> sdbusplus lib.
>
> >
> > When I change the "CMakeLists.txt.in" to use the same revision as the one in
> > sdbusplus_git.bb, the issue is gone and bmcweb behaves normally.
>
> This is really confusing to me.  When building the openbmc image, this
> should have zero effect.  Can you verify you're building with "bitbake
> obmc-phosphor-image"?  What machine are you building for?

What I was doing is:

1. devtool modify bmcweb
2. Go to build/workspace/sources/bmcweb, modify the code
3. bitbake obmc-phosphor-image

So it looks like when bmcweb is being built with devtool, the
YOCTO_DEPENDENCIES is missing, is it?

Be noted that devtool is a yocto tool, see below reference:
* https://www.yoctoproject.org/software-item/devtool/
* https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/TipsAndTricks/Patching_the_source_for_a_recipe

>
> >
> > So the question is, why bmcweb uses sdbusplus this way? Is it possible to make
> > it just link against sdbusplus like other repos?
> >
>
> See above about static analysis, and building out of the yocto tree.