Re: [bitbake-devel] [RFC] Proposal: New tool to display recipe dependency trees

[Osama Abdelkader <osama.abdelkader@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 07:04:12PM +0100, Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Nov 2025 at 18:24, Osama Abdelkader via
> lists.openembedded.org
> <osama.abdelkader=gmail.com@lists.openembedded.org> wrote:
> > Should the tool:
> >
> > cover only DEPENDS (build-time)?
> > include RDEPENDS with pkgdata?
> > resolve virtual/ providers?
> >
> > Any prior work I may have missed?
> >
> > If the idea is acceptable, I will prepare a proper implementation and send a patchset to the appropriate mailing list.
> > Thank you for your feedback!
>

Hello Alex,
 
> Hello Osama,
> 
> DEPENDS is a somewhat unfortunate variable name that we're stuck with.
> 
> It does not actually specify a recipe dependency, it specifies
> something more specific:
> 
> - run A.do_populate_sysroot before B.do_prepare_recipe_sysroot (a task
> dependency)
> - within B.do_prepare_recipe_sysroot task, take the output that
> A.do_populate_sysroot produced and place that into B's sysroot (a hint
> for sysroot creation)

Yes, I know that.
> 
> So I feel that any tool that aims to make things easier should
> continue to present particular tasks; there's really no such thing as
> 'recipe-level dependency'.
> 
> In addition to that RDEPENDS is not specifying recipes. It is
> specifying packages that the recipes produce (which sometimes match
> the recipe names, but are otherwise distinct). You really should not
> mix them together.
> 
> I guess the question we need to ask is why 'bitbake -g' output is
> difficult to understand or unhelpful in resolving questions people
> have about dependencies. How can we make that better?

Exactly. 
For me, the output dot file usually is so large and not "human-friendly" to trace.
> 
> Alex

My motivation actually was so simple, to know why a certain package is needed in an image.
The simple way now AFAIK is to exclude it, then bitbake prints backtrace e.g.

dnf
 ├── libdnf
 │    ├── libsolv
 │    └── json-c
 └── sqlite3

dnf -> libdnf -> libsolv

libsolv is needed for dnf. so would be good to have a query command or simple tool to show that?
something like apt-rdepends output.

BR,
Osama