PACKAGE_EXCLUDE_COMPLEMENTARY question

PACKAGE_EXCLUDE_COMPLEMENTARY question

[Rasmus Villemoes]

Hi

I was playing around with adding ptest packages to our rootfs to see how
many of those tests would actually succeed on our targets, and if the
rate was high enough, I'd do it permanently and run them as part of our
normal test suite.

But it turns out I can't simply turn on ptest-pkgs, as it blows up the
rootfs beyond what there's room for on many of our targets. One of the
biggest offenders is openssl-ptest, weighing in at +650M (roughly 3x the
size of the rootfs before adding any ptest packages...). So I looked
around for a knob to say "yes, to install most -ptest packages, but not
these...". There's PACKAGE_EXCLUDE_COMPLEMENTARY, which sort-of seems to
be intended for this (though undocumented).

However, just adding "openssl" to that variable does not elide
openssl-ptest from the image. After adding --debug to the
'oe-pkgdata-util glob' invocation in install_complementary(), I see that
yes,

DEBUG: openssl -> !!

the openssl package itself gets ignored, but there are two "aliases"
(for lack of the proper word) which do end up pulling in openssl-ptest:

DEBUG: libcrypto3 (*-ptest) -> openssl-ptest
DEBUG: libssl3 (*-ptest) -> openssl-ptest

I suppose adding those as well to PACKAGE_EXCLUDE_COMPLEMENTARY would do
the job, but playing that game of whack-a-mole can't be how it's meant
to be.

Coding-wise, this seems to come down to skipregex not being used at all
in the "# Main processing loop", in particular not after reading the pn
which a given package came from. But I have no idea how to modify that
code to take skipregex into account or what could/would break if one did
that.

Also, had there been for example a openssl-bash-completion package, I
didn't really want to exclude that from the complementary package
list. IOW, what I'd really want is not a filter on the input to the
globbing, but a filter on the output from the "oe-pkgdata-util
glob". Perhaps something like a PACKAGE_IGNORE_COMPLEMENTARY which would
be subtracted from complementary_pkgs in install_complementary()? Or
just use the existing PACKAGE_EXCLUDE and subtract that from the list to
be installed? Adding openssl-ptest to PACKAGE_EXCLUDE currently fails
hard because we end up asking the backend to both install and exclude
the same package.

Rasmus

Re: [OE-core] PACKAGE_EXCLUDE_COMPLEMENTARY question

[Alexander Kanavin]

Yocto CI is using a different approach: each ptest package gets its
own image, and they're all built with a meta-target
core-image-ptest-all. Then they're tested in parallel with bitbake -c
testimage core-image-ptest-all. I'd say this scales better and runs
the tests faster than shoving all of ptest into a single image, so I
would explore in that direction, e.g. you can write a custom version
of core-image-ptest-all with exclusion lists.

Alex

On Fri, 17 Jul 2026 at 13:26, Rasmus Villemoes via
lists.openembedded.org
<rasmus.villemoes=prevas.dk@lists.openembedded.org> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> I was playing around with adding ptest packages to our rootfs to see how
> many of those tests would actually succeed on our targets, and if the
> rate was high enough, I'd do it permanently and run them as part of our
> normal test suite.
>
> But it turns out I can't simply turn on ptest-pkgs, as it blows up the
> rootfs beyond what there's room for on many of our targets. One of the
> biggest offenders is openssl-ptest, weighing in at +650M (roughly 3x the
> size of the rootfs before adding any ptest packages...). So I looked
> around for a knob to say "yes, to install most -ptest packages, but not
> these...". There's PACKAGE_EXCLUDE_COMPLEMENTARY, which sort-of seems to
> be intended for this (though undocumented).
>
> However, just adding "openssl" to that variable does not elide
> openssl-ptest from the image. After adding --debug to the
> 'oe-pkgdata-util glob' invocation in install_complementary(), I see that
> yes,
>
> DEBUG: openssl -> !!
>
> the openssl package itself gets ignored, but there are two "aliases"
> (for lack of the proper word) which do end up pulling in openssl-ptest:
>
> DEBUG: libcrypto3 (*-ptest) -> openssl-ptest
> DEBUG: libssl3 (*-ptest) -> openssl-ptest
>
> I suppose adding those as well to PACKAGE_EXCLUDE_COMPLEMENTARY would do
> the job, but playing that game of whack-a-mole can't be how it's meant
> to be.
>
> Coding-wise, this seems to come down to skipregex not being used at all
> in the "# Main processing loop", in particular not after reading the pn
> which a given package came from. But I have no idea how to modify that
> code to take skipregex into account or what could/would break if one did
> that.
>
> Also, had there been for example a openssl-bash-completion package, I
> didn't really want to exclude that from the complementary package
> list. IOW, what I'd really want is not a filter on the input to the
> globbing, but a filter on the output from the "oe-pkgdata-util
> glob". Perhaps something like a PACKAGE_IGNORE_COMPLEMENTARY which would
> be subtracted from complementary_pkgs in install_complementary()? Or
> just use the existing PACKAGE_EXCLUDE and subtract that from the list to
> be installed? Adding openssl-ptest to PACKAGE_EXCLUDE currently fails
> hard because we end up asking the backend to both install and exclude
> the same package.
>
> Rasmus
>
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