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

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
> <[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.
> 

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