Howdy!

Am 29.06.2021 um 01:28 schrieb Jonas Vautherin:

I was thinking about my issue described here [1], and discovered the variables called COMPATIBLE_MACHINE and COMPATIBLE_HOST, which "you can use to stop recipes from being built for machines (/hosts) with which the recipes are not compatible". And so I wondered if it would make sense to add COMPATIBLE_IMAGE, for a similar purpose.
Let me explain my issue: I define different images in different layers (say `first-project-image` and `second-project-image`), and in each of those layers I create `.bbappends` to configure some packages. Typically `hostapd` is used by both images, but with a different config file.
The thing is that when I run `bitbake first-project-image`, because `second-project-image` is part of my bblayers.conf, then the hostapd_%.bbappend from `second-project-image` is used and may have an impact on `first-project-image`, which I don't want. I really want this bbappend to only affect the image `second-project-image`.
One way I can see to deal with that is to realize that `first-project-image` and `second-project-image` are two different projects, and build them from two different BUILDDIRs. The thing I don't like here is that all the packages are therefore downloaded and built twice, which seems like a loss of time and space.
That's where I thought about COMPATIBLE_IMAGE. In the hostapd_%.bbappend of `first-project-image`, I would set "COMPATIBLE_IMAGE = 'first-project-image'", and similarly for "COMPATIBLE_IMAGE = 'second-project-image'". So that I could still share a BUILDDIR between different projects.

Yocto chant #1 applies: "Recipe data is local, configuration data is global." Means: the recipe does not see at all which image it is being built for. So it also can't react to it - you can't check a variable against something you do not even see.

How bad of an idea is that?

It just doesn't work. If that counts as "bad" is left for you to decide :)

What you actually might use is using different DISTROs for the images, because that actually what they mean to do: you change the ABI/API of the image. And you can also define a base DISTRO and COMPATIBLE_DISTRO derivatives, so its all there already. It just cannot be triggered from the image, because, well.. see first pragraph of the answer.

Greetz

Thanks in advance,
Jonas
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68167244/image-specific-layers <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68167244/image-specific-layers>