[bitbake-devel] Error message: "The metadata is not deterministic and this needs to be fixed"

[Jianxun Zhang]

Hi RP and others,

I eventually triggered this issue when debugging another bug. I replace/override/append a single variable many times in the same local.conf, and do the incremental build every time. I also changed recipes and bbclasses for my need but no any hack in sstate or BB cache. It happened only once and disappeared with more tests.

https://patchwork.openembedded.org/patch/133517/ should be the original patch to add this check.

Does this error indicate BB user did something wrong and should fix it, or it is an internal error of BB? Will the build and caches be still stable and work correctly after it?

Thanks lot!