Stripping base path off the unpacked source tree with bitbake SRC_URI file:// fetcher - yocto

Question

The manual here says that there is a basepath option to SRC_URI that should "strip the specified directories from the source path when unpacking".
I'm trying to fetch the sources from a local directory, say /src/someproject.
For that purpose I configured my recipe as follows:
SRC_URI="file:///src/someproject;subdir=source;basepath=/src/someproject"
The intention was to have the sources taken from /src/someproject directory and put into build/tmp/work/target/someproject/1.0-r1/source/. Instead, I'm getting the sources under build/tmp/work/target/someproject/1.0-r1/source/src/someproject.
Is there a way to get rid of /src/someproject subdirectory inside source ?

Answer 1

The documentation you point to is for yocto 1.6, release April 2014. The basepath parameter appears to have been removed in later releases, with no fanfare and no apparent replacement.
Instead you can do something like:
SRCDIR = "/path/to/your/files"
SRC_URI = "file://${SRCDIR}/contents/;subdir=src"
S = "${WORKDIR}/src"
Then you can access your files under ${S}/${SRCDIR}.
If you find using the ${SRCDIR} part too cumbersome, you can hook onto the do_patch target, which need the prefunc mechanism and not _prepend if you want to use shell scripting, as do_patch is otherwise written in python:
relocate_source() {
mv ${S}/${SRCDIR}/* ${S}/
rmdir ${S}/${SRCDIR}
}
do_patch[prefunc] += "relocate_source"
This will reorganise your source before applying any patch you can add to SRC_URI.
Also note that a file:// URI does not get cached in ${DL_DIR}, so there is no name-conflict to handle (the way we would need to use downloadfilename= in an http:// URI).