Bug 4965

Summary:	Not possible to pass the preferred version to bitbake on the command line
Product:	[Build System, Metadata & Runtime] BitBake	Reporter:	Laszlo Papp <lpapp>
Component:	bitbake	Assignee:	Robert Yang <liezhi.yang>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	Low	CC:	bluelightning, liezhi.yang, poky.bs.watcher, poky.watcher, richard.purdie, sgw, srifenbark
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	Future
Hardware:	All
OS:	Multiple
Whiteboard:
OS type for building Yocto:	---	Type of Regression:	---
Verified:		Documentation change:	Don't know

Description Laszlo Papp 2013-07-31 11:24:42 UTC

It would be nice to have this feature for experimenting, at least, around.

u-boot is getting several versions, and it would be simpler to test a different version in case of tracking buys and so forth rather than modifying the config file, and then modifying it back.

If one uses the -b option for absolute path to the recipe, then it will not handle the dependencies automatically.

If it is already possible, then document it, please.

Comment 1 Saul Wold 2013-08-01 06:35:40 UTC

Thanks for the report.

One can use the PREFERRED_VERSION_u-boot = "<version>" in your local.conf file, I believe the variable is documented in the manual.  We use this method for the compiler and eglibc, and they are set in the distro/include/tcmode-default.inc or distro/include/default-versions.  So examples exist.

Is that information sufficient?

Comment 2 Laszlo Papp 2013-08-01 06:43:44 UTC

local.conf != command line.

Comment 3 Robert Yang 2013-08-29 03:27:19 UTC

(In reply to comment #0)
> It would be nice to have this feature for experimenting, at least, around.
> 
> u-boot is getting several versions, and it would be simpler to test a
> different version in case of tracking buys and so forth rather than
> modifying the config file, and then modifying it back.
> 
> If one uses the -b option for absolute path to the recipe, then it will not
> handle the dependencies automatically.
> 

I think that you can use "bitbake uboot-<version>" .

> If it is already possible, then document it, please.

Comment 4 Robert Yang 2013-09-12 02:23:42 UTC

(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #0)
> > It would be nice to have this feature for experimenting, at least, around.
> > 
> > u-boot is getting several versions, and it would be simpler to test a
> > different version in case of tracking buys and so forth rather than
> > modifying the config file, and then modifying it back.
> > 
> > If one uses the -b option for absolute path to the recipe, then it will not
> > handle the dependencies automatically.
> > 
> 
> I think that you can use "bitbake uboot-<version>" .
> 

Now, we can't use the bitbake uboot-<version>, but you can set BB_PRESERVE_ENV=1 and then set PREFERRED_VERSION_xxx from the environment.

There is one other problem, you can't use "-" in a shell environment variable so you can't do:

PREFERRED_VERSION_make-native = xxx

which is annoying. We might want to add some kind of mangling mechanism
like a double underscore translating to a dash or something...

Cheers,

Richard

We will go on working on it in 1.6

> > If it is already possible, then document it, please.

Comment 5 Richard Purdie 2017-08-17 15:20:23 UTC

I don't think this is worth doing, particularly given the complexities of invalid chars in the environment variable names. No action in a long time so closing.