When debugging certain commands or even when just editing packages,
devshell
can be a useful tool.
When you invoke devshell
, source files are
extracted into your working directory and patches are applied.
Then, a new terminal is opened and you are placed in the working directory.
In the new terminal, all the OpenEmbedded build-related environment variables are
still defined so you can use commands such as configure
and
make
.
The commands execute just as if the OpenEmbedded build system were executing them.
Consequently, working this way can be helpful when debugging a build or preparing
software to be used with the OpenEmbedded build system.
Following is an example that uses devshell
on a target named
matchbox-desktop
:
$ bitbake matchbox-desktop -c devshell
This command spawns a terminal with a shell prompt within the OpenEmbedded build environment.
The OE_TERMINAL
variable controls what type of shell is opened.
For spawned terminals, the following occurs:
The PATH
variable includes the
cross-toolchain.
The pkgconfig
variables find the correct
.pc
files.
The configure
command finds the
Yocto Project site files as well as any other necessary files.
Within this environment, you can run configure or compile
commands as if they were being run by
the OpenEmbedded build system itself.
As noted earlier, the working directory also automatically changes to the
Source Directory (S
).
When you are finished, you just exit the shell or close the terminal window.
It is worth remembering that when using devshell
you need to use the full compiler name such as arm-poky-linux-gnueabi-gcc
instead of just using gcc
.
The same applies to other applications such as binutils
,
libtool
and so forth.
BitBake sets up environment variables such as CC
to assist applications, such as make
to find the correct tools.
It is also worth noting that devshell
still works over
X11 forwarding and similar situations.