Will be good that bitbake recipe support version constraint in DEPENDS/RDEPENDS this helps to, - Have multiple versions of recipes (binaries, libraries) in clean manner. - Better handling of dependencies between recipes. I purpose the next operators <=, <, ===, >, >= and will be next to recipe name, DEPENDS="recipe==1.0.0".
We did add support to bitbake to at least accept version information in these fields. We can therefore add it and it will be parsed safely however Bitbake doesn't currently process that information though.
There already is version support in RDEPENDS, so this is just about DEPENDS. I propose that the first iterate is just a sanity check: if foo-1 and foo-2 are in a layer, bar DEPENDS on foo (>2) but foo-1 is selected then bitbake should error out.
I've been using Poky for quite a while now, but nearly all my work has been at the class and recipe level. If you can suggestions a likely place to insert an implementation of Ross's first suggestion (sanity checking), I can have a go at that.
Bulk move from 4.99 or 0.00 to 5.99