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

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

On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 07:20:52PM +0100, Quentin Schulz wrote:
> Hi Osama,
> 
> On 11/24/25 7:04 PM, Alexander Kanavin via lists.openembedded.org 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 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)
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> In addition to what Alex said, you also have RRECOMMENDS, PACKAGECONFIG,
> anonymous python functions, dynamic packaging, etc. that allow to specify
> build or runtime dependencies outside of the more common DEPENDS/RDEPENDS,
> so you'd need to interface with the internals of bitbake and not simply
> checking those variables.
> 
> Finally, there are other ways to do dependencies than those variables, as
> highlighted by Alex already. DEPENDS does A.do_populate_sysroot before
> B.do_prepare_recipe_sysroot, but you also have other ways to have
> dependencies, see the u-boot recipe for Rockchip boards here https://git.yoctoproject.org/meta-rockchip/tree/recipes-bsp/u-boot/u-boot-rockchip.inc.
> We depend on 1+ binary (TF-A/BL31 and OP-TEE OS/BL32) that needs to be
> available in the deploy directory before building the u-boot recipe.
> 
> Cheers,
> Quentin

Hi Quentin,

Yes, that needs to be taken into consideration too. IMHO, we need to know if 
such tool/sub-command would be helpful, or we can enhance bitbake -g, or something else
and we can go further with the details.

Thanks.

BR,
Osama