Explaining package versioning
Package versioning is used to differentiate the same package in different stages of its life cycle. From Poky's perspective, it is also used as part of the equation that generates the checksum used by BitBake to verify whether a task must be rebuilt.
The package version, also known as PV
, plays a central role when we select which recipe to build. The default behavior of Poky is to always prefer the newest recipe version, unless there is an explicit different preference, as we discussed in the Chapter 4, Grasping the BitBake Tool. For example, consider that we have two versions of the recipe myrecipe—myrecipe_1.0.bb
and myrecipe_1.1.bb
. BitBake, by default, builds the recipe with version 1.1.
Inside the recipe, we may have other variables that compose package versioning with the PV
variable. These are package epoch, known as PE
and package revision, known as PR
.
The PE
variable has a default value of zero and is used when the package version schema is changed, breaking...