If I have some source I want to bring into my layer, for example:

Recipe dir:

meta-mylayer/recipes-management/myapplication/myapplication_1.0/<tons of source files>

What is the best option for adding all of these and compiling? As far as I know, you have to do one of the following:

1) Use a fetch that fetches a tarball with all your source, or a repo with all of your source

2) Use a million-line long SRC_URI assignment to include every file that your application uses.

Is there a third (or fourth) option that I may have missed?

Not necessarily best practice, but it is something that bitbake has supported.

If you create a directory under myapplication_1.0 that is unique and not an override, you can specify the directory name
as the SRC_URI and bitbake will pull the directory and its contents in.

Something like meta-mylayer/recipes-management/myapplication/myapplication_1.0/mysources/<tons of source files>

and SRC_URI file://mysources

It should work.

Something like the following:

> find recipes/
recipes/
recipes/myapp
recipes/myapp/files
recipes/myapp/files/mysources
recipes/myapp/files/mysources/Makefile
recipes/myapp/myapp_1.0.bb
> cat recipes/myapp/myapp_1.0.bb
LICENSE="MIT"
LIC_FILES_CHKSUM = "file://${COREBASE}/meta/COPYING.MIT;md5=3da9cfbcb788c80a0384361b4de20420"

SRC_URI = "file://mysources"

S="${WORKDIR}/mysources"

Michael

-- 
Jeremy A. Puhlman
jpuhlman@...