[oe] Bitbaking while modifying recipes

[Frans Meulenbroeks]

2010/10/14 Chris Larson <clarson at kergoth.com>:
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Ash Charles <ashcharles at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> At what point in bitbaking a recipe is it safe to start modifying the
>> recipe without risk of messing up the current bitbake build?  I often
>> find myself kicking off a bitbake and then wanting to do some git
>> operations in my openembedded recipes tree.  Previously I've resisted
>> the urge to mess around until whatever is being bitbaked is done but I
>> suspect that I'd be fine to make changes as soon as the parse step is
>> completed.  Is this correct?
>
>
> Unfortunately not.  As things stand today, the upfront parsing phase is only
> used to populate the cache / obtain the info necessary to construct the
> runqueue.  The recipes are actually *reparsed* when each task is executed.
>  The time taken by the parse is rather trivial, so its not much of an issue,
> but I do have a patch in queue from a coworker to make it cache the parsed
> recipe until the last task for that recipe is run.
>
> So, basically, continue to resist the urge :)
>
As far as I see it (and this seems not to contradict with what Chris
wrote) it is ok to work on a recipe after the parsing has finished if
it is a recipe that is not being build (either directly or indirectly
through depends).
E.g. if you are building busybox I feel you could still work on a qt
recipe while the busybox build is in progress ((or even on another
version of the busybox recipe (e.g. one with DEFAULT_PREFERENCE =
"-1"))

Chris, can you confirm?