As software matures, upstream recipes are upgraded to newer
versions.
As a developer, you need to keep your local recipes up-to-date
with the upstream version releases.
Several methods exist by which you can upgrade recipes.
You can read about them in the
"Upgrading Recipes"
section of the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual.
This section overviews the devtool upgrade
command.
The devtool upgrade
command
upgrades an existing recipe to a more recent version of the
recipe upstream.
The command puts the upgraded recipe file along with any associated
files into a "workspace" and, if necessary, extracts the source
tree to a specified location.
During the upgrade, patches associated with the recipe are
rebased or added as needed.
When you use the devtool upgrade
command,
you must supply the root name of the recipe (i.e. no version,
paths, or extensions), and you must supply the directory
to which you want the source extracted.
Additional command options let you control things such as
the version number to which you want to upgrade (i.e. the
PV
),
the source revision to which you want to upgrade (i.e. the
SRCREV
),
whether or not to apply patches, and so forth.
You can read more on the devtool upgrade
workflow in the
"Use devtool upgrade
to Create a Version of the Recipe that Supports a Newer Version of the Software"
section in the Yocto Project Application Development and the
Extensible Software Development Kit (eSDK) manual.
You can also see an example of how to use
devtool upgrade
in the
"Using devtool upgrade
"
section in the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual.