Capturing changes with devtool
In the previous chapter, you learned how to create a recipe for a helloworld program from scratch. A copy-paste approach to packaging recipes may work initially, but it soon becomes very frustrating as your project grows and the number of recipes you need to maintain multiplies. I'm here to show you a better way of working with package recipes – both yours and those that are contributed to upstream by some third party. It is called devtool and it is the cornerstone of Yocto's extensible SDK.
Development workflows
Before you get started with devtool, you want to make sure that you're doing your work in a new layer instead of modifying recipes in-tree. Otherwise, you could easily overwrite and lose hours and hours of work:
- First, navigate one level above the directory where you cloned Yocto.
- Next, set up your BitBake work environment:
$ source poky/oe-init-build-env build-mine
This sets a bunch of environment variables...
