From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mga03.intel.com (mga03.intel.com [143.182.124.21]) by yocto-www.yoctoproject.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6CB04E01567 for ; Wed, 12 Jun 2013 01:52:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from azsmga001.ch.intel.com ([10.2.17.19]) by azsmga101.ch.intel.com with ESMTP; 12 Jun 2013 01:52:15 -0700 X-ExtLoop1: 1 X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.87,850,1363158000"; d="scan'208";a="315763259" Received: from unknown (HELO helios.localnet) ([10.252.122.12]) by azsmga001.ch.intel.com with ESMTP; 12 Jun 2013 01:52:14 -0700 From: Paul Eggleton To: "Paul D. DeRocco" Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:52:13 +0100 Message-ID: <1416168.giHTHvEE4P@helios> Organization: Intel Corporation User-Agent: KMail/4.10.3 (Linux/3.8.0-23-generic; KDE/4.10.3; i686; ; ) In-Reply-To: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Cc: yocto@yoctoproject.org Subject: Re: What does "virtual/" mean? X-BeenThere: yocto@yoctoproject.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.13 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion of all things Yocto Project List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:52:16 -0000 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hi Paul, On Wednesday 12 June 2013 01:43:31 Paul D. DeRocco wrote: > I see lots of references to "virtual/kernel", as opposed to simply "kernel". > The bitbake docs show "virtual/whatever" and "virtual/package" in some of > its syntactic examples. But what does the "virtual/" prefix actually mean? > Google coughs up endless uses of the term, as though everyone knows what it > means, but no explanation of it. It's simply a convention to indicate the particular item is not a real package but a virtual placeholder that could be configured at build time to point to one of a selection of different providers; i.e. a recipe that requires kernel headers could have virtual/kernel in its DEPENDS rather than having to name a specific kernel recipe and the distro or machine configuration can set PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel to point to whatever real kernel recipe is desired. Cheers, Paul -- Paul Eggleton Intel Open Source Technology Centre