The allarch
class is inherited
by recipes that do not produce architecture-specific output.
The class disables functionality that is normally needed for recipes
that produce executable binaries (such as building the cross-compiler
and a C library as pre-requisites, and splitting out of debug symbols
during packaging).
Unlike some distro recipes (e.g. Debian), OpenEmbedded recipes
that produce packages that depend on tunings through use of the
RDEPENDS
and
TUNE_PKGARCH
variables, should never be configured for all architectures
using allarch
.
This is the case even if the recipes do not produce
architecture-specific output.
Configuring such recipes for all architectures causes the
do_package_write_*
tasks to have different signatures for the machines with different
tunings.
Additionally, unnecessary rebuilds occur every time an
image for a different MACHINE
is built
even when the recipe never changes.
By default, all recipes inherit the
base
and
package
classes, which enable functionality
needed for recipes that produce executable output.
If your recipe, for example, only produces packages that contain
configuration files, media files, or scripts (e.g. Python and Perl),
then it should inherit the allarch
class.