Tracking variable assignments in bitbake

I presume you've discovered bitbake -e, right? That dumps the environment specific to a single bitbake "target" (ie. a recipe.) I believe FILESPATH is the key variable that bitbake uses to find files specified in a file:// SRC_URI component. Using bitbake -e (recipe) | grep ^FILESPATH= will display that very large path variable!

I don't know of a way to track assignments to that variable, but there are several ways to modify it. (Actually I recall a bitbake patch which would annotate the output of bitbake -e with what file modified which variable but can't recall the details. Ask on the oe list.) In any case, if you remove the = sign from the grep above you can see the other ways FILESPATH can be modified. I think this is covered in the various docs, as well.

Finally, you may have better luck asking on the openembedded mailing list, rather than here on stackoverflow.

bitbake -e and the log files (found in ${WORKDIR}/temp) are your best debug tools. (Also check out ack-grep. Better than grep for some bitbake-related use cases.) Where is WORKDIR you ask?

bitbake -e (recipe) | grep ^WORKDIR=

Once you get familiar with WORKDIR, you'll see the pattern and won't have to find it that way.

Happy baking! ;)