How can a package I didn't ask for get included in my image?

[Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com>]

Note: I'm not sure the best list to use for this, but I'll start
here.  I build using poky plus my own distro.conf and my own image
recipes, etc.  My example below uses stylized package and target
names.

I'm trying to figure out why a particular package is ending up
in my final image.  If I build something like this:
   % bitbake my-image
If I then look, I find packages that were installed that I'm
never mentioning:
   % grep firmware tmp/work/my-board/my-image/temp/log.do_rootfs
   Installing linux-firmware-wl12xx (0.0+git1+09c949f6d3196a7199eb2c7015bfa5d34ed723b5-r0) to root...
so I tried to figure out how this is getting in
   % bitbake my-image -g
   % grep firmware *.dot
   ... comes up empty

To be fair, I had originally built this image with this in <my-board>.conf
   MACHINE_EXTRA_RRECOMMENDS = " kernel-modules linux-firmware-wl12xx "
but that has since been removed.  Somehow, it's ghost lingers on...

How can this be?
How can I get rid of it, short of a complete rebuild?

Thanks for any insight into this mystery.

-- 
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Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
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