Many factors can influence the quality of a build. For example, if you upgrade a recipe to use a new version of an upstream software package or you experiment with some new configuration options, subtle changes can occur that you might not detect until later. Consider the case where your recipe is using a newer version of an upstream package. In this case, a new version of a piece of software might introduce an optional dependency on another library, which is auto-detected. If that library has already been built when the software is building, the software will link to the built library and that library will be pulled into your image along with the new software even if you did not want the library.
The
buildhistory
class exists to help you maintain the quality of your build
output.
You can use the class to highlight unexpected and possibly
unwanted changes in the build output.
When you enable build history, it records information about the
contents of each package and image and then commits that
information to a local Git repository where you can examine
the information.
The remainder of this section describes the following:
How you can enable and disable build history
How to understand what the build history contains
How to limit the information used for build history
How to examine the build history from both a command-line and web interface