[OE-core] is "LINUX_VERSION" actually needed for a kernel checkout?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  pawing my way through the kernel recipe file and checkout code so i
understand it once and for all, and i'm curious about the setting of:

LINUX_VERSION ?= "3.4.4"

in linux-yocto_3.4.bb.

  for my example, i'm testing with straight oe-core and building for
qemuarm, so i can see the following relevant lines from the kernel
recipe file that will affect my kernel checkout:

KBRANCH_qemuarm  = "standard/arm-versatile-926ejs"
SRCREV_machine_qemuarm ?= "9aca8fec49787efbe44d0f137f31ee59edd94c49"
SRCREV_meta ?= "a8cf77018b0faa0d29f1483ff4e5a2034dc8edd5"

SRC_URI =
"git://git.yoctoproject.org/linux-yocto-3.4.git;protocol=git;nocheckout=1;branch=${KBRANCH},meta;name=machine,meta"

LINUX_VERSION ?= "3.4.4"

  as i read the docs (and i could be totally off-base), the KBRANCH
variable identifies the branch i want for my checkout, while the
SRCREV_machine variable identifies the particular commit on that
branch that i want (typically, it's a merge of standard/base into that
branch).  and of course, SRCREV_meta is the state of the meta branch i
want for further configuration.

  but at no time did i need to know the tagged kernel version that my
machine branch was based on, did i?  so for the purposes of what
happened above, i didn't *require* the value of LINUX_VERSION, did i?

  i can see that it will be handy in, say, creating meaningful
directory names for building.  but beyond that, what else is it used
for?  (i haven't got to the meta/ directory processing yet, so i have
no idea whether it's suddenly necessary there.)

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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