[oe] build dependency cycles in openembedded

[Andreas Müller]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 7:54 PM, Johannes Schauer <j.schauer at email.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Quoting Marko Lindqvist (2013-02-18 18:22:26)
>> OE has both native build and cross-compile part, and problems can arise in
>> native part too. One example is that pkg-config version used has not been
>> updated for a while since build of newer version would depend on glib, which
>> needs pkg-config to build...
>
> Great example! The same loop exists in binary distributions. Though there it is
> a bit more involved since the notion of binary and source packages exists.
> Therefor the loop you mention is not between the pkg-config and glib source
> packages but between the pkg-config source package and the glib development
> headers binary package libglib2.0-dev. So while the glib source package can be
> built without pkg-config if ./configure is called with manually supplied
> arguments like this:
>
>     ./configure \
>         PKG_CONFIG=false \
>         ZLIB_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include ZLIB_LIBS="-L/usr/lib -lz" \
>         LIBFFI_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include LIBFFI_LIBS="-L/usr/lib -lffi" \
>         --disable-libelf \
>         --with-pcre=internal
>
> The dependency loop does still exist because the binary package libglib2.0-dev
> can only be installed if the pkg-config binary package exists. But the
> pkg-config binary package can only be built from the pkg-config source package
> using the uninstallable libglib2.0-dev binary package....
>
> So while it is good to hear an example for a dependency cycle in OpenEmbedded,
> I now wonder why I didnt find more instances where those impact the development
> and deployment of the OpenEmbedded distribution for new platforms?
>
> cheers, josch
>
FWIW long time ago in meta-oe commit
5b8522e3b592c96ec9325aff4bbaa68972e52d5b gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor was
spitted out into an own recipe to break dependency loop for gvfs.

Andreas