[yocto] Correctly setting a package-specific RDEPENDS

[Jon Szymaniak]

Hi all,

I recently upgraded to the Dylan (9.0.0) release and am looking to
clean up some QA issues associated with my RDEPENDS variables not
being package-specific.

I'm a bit confused by a couple lines in the manual [1]:

"The names of the variables you list with RDEPENDS must be the names
of other packages as listed in the PACKAGES variable. You should not
list recipe names (PN)."

It makes sense to me that you'd want to set the run-time deps on a
per-package basis to avoid creating false-dependencies. However, I'm
unsure as to how can simply not write RDEPENDS_${PN} in some cases.
Furthermore, I feel like I'm not quite understanding what the
consequences of using RDEPENDS_${PN} are.

Here's an example of what I'm trying to do -- perhaps someone will
catch where I'm getting confused and offer some insight?

Let's say I have a program_a.bb and a program_b.bb. Both are simple
recipes that compile and install ${D}/usr/bin/program_a and
${D}/usr/bin/program_b.

Because program_a forks and execs program_b, but otherwise does not
depend upon it to compile, I thought I should place RDEPENDS_${PN} =
"program_b " in program_a.bb.  However, this seems to violate the
aforementioned snippet from the manual.


Thanks!


[1] http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/current/mega-manual/mega-manual.html#var-RDEPENDS