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

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

On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 07:53:52PM +0100, Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Nov 2025 at 19:42, Osama Abdelkader
> <osama.abdelkader@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Yes, absolutely, and this is missing. You can deduce it from 'bitbake
> -g', but it requires look at dependencies of particular tasks
> (package_write_* if memory serves) and ignoring all other task
> dependencies, and then making a mental dependency chain in your head
> if the dependency is indirect. This could probably be post-processed
> with some filtering tool to only make a tree of those dependencies,
> and present it in a human friendly tree format.
> 
> One other idea is to add a task to image recipes that would produce a
> tree of package dependencies. E.g. instead of making a package repo
> and then constructing a root filesystem from it with a package
> manager, it would use the repo to write out a tree of their
> dependencies - unrolling the top level packages that the image
> specifies to install. Probably it could use package managers like
> dnf/apt/opkg to assist with that.
> 
> Alex

Thanks Alex for the feedback, I'm going to work on that soon.

BR,
Osama