Tracking image, package, and SDK contents

The easiest way to ensure we have the image, packages, and SDK, along with the expected contents, is to use the Build History mechanism.

When a recipe is updated for a new version or has its code changed, it may influence the contents put in the generated packages and, as a consequence, in the image or SDK.

As Poky deals with a huge amount of recipes, and our images or SDKs frequently have tens or hundreds of packages included, it may be quite difficult to track the package contents. The Poky tool responsible for helping us in this task is the Build History.

The Build History, as we can guess from its name, keeps a history of the contents of several artifacts built during the use of Poky. It can track package, image, and SDK building.

To enable the Build History in our system, we need to add the following lines of code in our build/conf/local.conf file:

INHERIT += "buildhistory"
BUILDHISTORY_COMMIT = "1"

The INHERIT method includes the buildhistory class...