When we see the list of dependencies of a layer in the layer index, we are only seeing the first level of dependencies - obviously the listed layers can (and do) have their own dependencies. It would be useful if you could drill down on a dependency to see what its dependencies are. I think we would be best advised to do this using AJAX so that we aren't always doing this recursive processing in order to display the page. I can imagine clicking on an arrow icon next to the dependency, and that would trigger it requesting the dependencies and then expanding to show that layer's dependencies indented underneath it, each with their own arrow icons to drill down further. This should be fairly easy to implement with the help of jQuery.
Thinking further, I wonder if a simpler way to implement this would be to have a UI button or other action to switch the list over to the full recursive list, since it turns out that's pretty easy to get (I just added a function to do that locally for something else).
bitbake-layers layerindex-fetch handles this recursive dependency checkout just fine, so it is certainly doable. One example is if meta-python is a dependency but meta-oe is not present in LAYERDEPENDS... but perhaps no recipes in the layer directly needed meta-oe. https://github.com/meta-homeassistant/meta-homeassistant/blob/fb20299f3feee001a6f91ff0d73525c00b5b40b3/conf/layer.conf#L14 From a user perspective, it might be annoying to have to declare all the recursive dependent layers in conf/layer.conf. This might be even more frustrating when trying to include dynamic-layers in LAYERRECOMMENDS, since that layer will have its own possibly recursive dependencies. The full recursive list would be nice if it was hierarchical with collapsible sub layer elements, but at least showing the hierarchy like bitbake-layers layerindex-fetch does would be a vast improvement.
Still valid.
Ready for review: https://patchwork.yoctoproject.org/project/yocto/patch/20260819125051.94223-1-piotr@qbee.io/