[yocto] creating images which include actively developed applications

[Paul Eggleton]

Hi Brian,

On Wednesday 22 April 2015 15:32:06 Brian Karcz wrote:
> I'm attempting to create a recipe for some custom applications that we want
> to include in our target image. The applications are actively developed and
> it's often desired to generate images without versioning the application
> code. It's also desired to be able to work in a source tree that is
> external to the build tree. I'm trying to determine if Yocto has a
> mechanism similar to the "source directory override" in Buildroot that
> allows you to point a package/recipe at an external directory to locate the
> source code.
>
> We have been using Poky for a couple years, but so far, have had to build
> the applications externally and use some magic in the image recipes to
> bring in the pre-built executables explicitly. We accomplished this by
> using some relative pathing in the SRC_URI and then placing the files in
> the rootfs by adding some commands to the image preprocess command.
> 
> Is there a way to create a recipe to build actively developed code located
> in an external source directory? Basically skip the fetch and unpack steps
> and always execute the compile and populate steps each time and image is
> built?

Indeed there is:

http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/current/dev-manual/dev-manual.html#building-software-from-an-external-source

Cheers,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre