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

On Mon, 24 Nov 2025 at 18:24, Osama Abdelkader via
lists.openembedded.org
<[email protected]> 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.

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?

Alex