Import sudoku project and configure to run against poky tree mode which has bitbake meta-ide-support for (i586-poky-linux), the autoconfigure command will be sth like: ../configure --host=i586-poky-linux --build=x86_64-linux --target=i586-poky-linux and it'll run into error: configure: error: Package requirements (gtk+-2.0 >= 2.4.0) were not met: No package 'gtk+-2.0' found Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you installed software in a non-standard prefix. Alternatively, you may set the environment variables PACKAGE_CFLAGS and PACKAGE_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config. ... While the same configure was fine against installed Poky SDK tar ball...
The meta-ide-support is a minimal recipe to ensure that basic tool requirements to support the IDE are available. The idea being that a developer using the IDE against their Poky build tree will have a full set of components, representing their target device, already available in their build directory. To add the gtk dependencies you need only bitbake gtk, or an image with gtk in it.
OK, then maybe we need to add some documentation regarding the poky tree mode usage.. As to your comment "The idea being that a developer using the IDE against their Poky build tree will have a full set of components, representing their target device, already available in their build directory." Then what the user need to do to achieve that before bitbake meta-ide-support? bitbake poky-image-sdk (for their target device) or bitbake gtk based on the error prompt what's missing? So it does mean that meta-ide-support had dependencies upon other things. If user must do poky-image-sdk, then why can't we combine what meta-ide-support does into it just like meta-toolchain-sdk does?
meta-ide-support provides enough support to allow the IDE to work against the Poky build directories. It does not (and should not) make assumptions about which libraries the user might want. The user is expected to bitbake them separately (they can use a task-* target to build groups of packages). If this isn't clear in the documentation, that should be fixed.