3.2.4. Customizing Images Using Custom Package Groups

For complex custom images, the best approach for customizing an image is to create a custom package group recipe that is used to build the image or images. A good example of a package group recipe is meta/recipes-core/packagegroups/packagegroup-base.bb.

If you examine that recipe, you see that the PACKAGES variable lists the package group packages to produce. The inherit packagegroup statement sets appropriate default values and automatically adds -dev, -dbg, and -ptest complementary packages for each package specified in the PACKAGES statement.

Note

The inherit packages should be located near the top of the recipe, certainly before the PACKAGES statement.

For each package you specify in PACKAGES, you can use RDEPENDS and RRECOMMENDS entries to provide a list of packages the parent task package should contain. You can see examples of these further down in the packagegroup-base.bb recipe.

Here is a short, fabricated example showing the same basic pieces:

     DESCRIPTION = "My Custom Package Groups"

     inherit packagegroup

     PACKAGES = "\
         packagegroup-custom-apps \
         packagegroup-custom-tools \
         "

     RDEPENDS_packagegroup-custom-apps = "\
         dropbear \
         portmap \
         psplash"

     RDEPENDS_packagegroup-custom-tools = "\
         oprofile \
         oprofileui-server \
         lttng-tools"

     RRECOMMENDS_packagegroup-custom-tools = "\
         kernel-module-oprofile"
                

In the previous example, two package group packages are created with their dependencies and their recommended package dependencies listed: packagegroup-custom-apps, and packagegroup-custom-tools. To build an image using these package group packages, you need to add packagegroup-custom-apps and/or packagegroup-custom-tools to IMAGE_INSTALL. For other forms of image dependencies see the other areas of this section.