[OE-core] Question about the behavior and intent of recrdeptask

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2020-01-08 at 12:14 +0900, Masahiro Yamada wrote:
> So, the concept of  "recursive dependency" sounds
> somewhat odd to me.
> 
> I guess I am missing important use-cases.
> I'd like to know the reason why we need recrdeptask.

FWIW your description sounds right. We need this flag for several
reasons. Firstly, it models the behaviour older bitbake had before we
switched to the full task model so it was partly there for
compatibility.

Secondly, it does serve a purpose. For example, if you do "bitbake
core-image-sato" and have PACKAGE_CLASSES = "ipk deb rpm".

In this case the user expects debs, rpms and ipks to all be generated
(the do_package_write_{ipk|deb|rpm} tasks) to be run for all recipes
involved in core-image-sato.

Since we only build the rootfs for ipk, the debs and rpms wouldn't bet
triggered unless we have the do_build[recrdepends] on do_build.

If you really wanted the other behaviour you would run "bitbake core-
image-sato -c image_complete" as in that sense the build task is
otherwise pointless.

It is a weird dependency though, I agree.

Cheers,

Richard