bb-depends-dot

Inspect recipes from Bitbake's task-depends.dot and the dependencies between these recipes.

Yocto/Poky ships the script oe-depends-dot which has stopped working some years ago when the output of bitbake -g changed. The same is true for oe-depends-dot from openembedded-core.
bb-depends-dot is a replacement.

Example:

# generate `task-depends.dot`
bitbake -g foo

# list recipes with at least one task that recipe "curl" depends on directly
bb-depends-dot task-depends.dot curl

# list recipes that have at least one task that directly depends on a task
# from recipe "curl":
bb-depends-dot task-depends.dot -r curl

# list recipes that have at least one task that transitively depends on a task
# from recipe "curl":
bb-depends-dot task-depends.dot -tr curl

# list recipes with at least one task that recipe "curl" depends on, and list
# all their dependencies
bb-depends-dot task-depends.dot -t curl

Options:

./bb-depends-dot - List dependencies between BitBake recipes.

Usage:
  ./bb-depends-dot [options] <task-depends.dot>
      List all recipes

  ./bb-depends-dot [options] <task-depends.dot> <recipe_name>
      List dependencies of a specific recipe

Options:
  --task-depends-dot <file> The task-depends.dot file generated by `bitbake -g`
  --recipe <recipe_name>    Select a recipe
  -d [ --depends ]          List dependencies of recipe (default if recipe 
                            given)
  -r [ --rdepends ]         List reverse dependencies of recipe
  -t [ --transitive ]       List all transitive dependencies of the given 
                            recipe
  -h [ --help ]             Print this help message
  -V [ --version ]          Print version

Install

Navigate to bb-depends-dot's latest release and download bb-depends-dot-static-linux-x86_64-*.zip.

unzip bb-depends-dot-static-linux-x86_64-*.zip
chmod +x bb-depends-dot
# move this binary to somewhere on your $PATH, e.g.:
mv -i bb-depends-dot ~/.local/bin/

This binary runs on any Linux (x86-64) with GLIBC≥2.14, which was released back in the year 2011.

Build from source:

Dependencies:

• A compiler with C++17 support, such as g++ ≥7 or clang++ ≥5
• cmake ≥3.10
• libboost-dev
• libboost-graph-dev
• libboost-program-options-dev

cd build
cmake ..
make
make install

How it works:

• bitbake -g generates a file called task-depends.dot containing a graph described with the DOT language.
• This graph contains an edge for each dependency between tasks of the recipes contained in a build.
• bb-depends-dot parses the taks-depends.dot file to build a graph of the dependencies between recipes.
• Transitive dependencies are resolved by using a breadth first search while recording the vertices (i.e. recipes).
• Direct dependencies are resolved by simply recording the adjacent vertices of the directed graph.
• The option --rdepends transforms the graph with boost::reverse_graph.
• Note that bb-depends-dot cannot parse arbitrary DOT. Only the output file of bitbake -g is supported.