Upgrading packages

General upgrading procedures

Different layers have different policies for keeping versions of software around. OE-Core for example is fairly agressive about having one, good, recent version of the software than many older versions. Other layers may have different policies.

There are two cases we need to consider:

1. You do want to keep the version of the bb file that is in OE now (somebody else needs this particular version)
2. You don't.

If you do not need to keep the last version of the package

1. Use git mv recipes-xyz/recipename/recipename_1.0.bb recipes-xyz/recipename/recipename_2.0.bb
2. Make further changes to recipes-xyz/recipename/recipename_2.0.bb as appropriate.
3. At the very minimum do a compilation test (bitbake recipename) to make sure the new package does at least fetch and compile.
4. Consider using buildhistory to check for changes between the versions. See Maintaining Build Output Quality in the Yocto Project Reference Manual.
5. Inspect the output of "git diff recipes-xyz/recipename/". Is this really what you want to commit?
6. Final step - publish your work. See How to submit a patch to OpenEmbedded

If you do want to keep the last version of the package

Same as above, except instead of the first step:

cp recipes-xyz/recipename/recipename_1.0.bb recipes-xyz/recipename/recipename_2.0.bb
git add recipes-xyz/recipename/recipename_2.0.bb

Guidelines

• If it is present, remove any line setting PR on upgrades (when PV changes).
• Generally we try to avoid pre-release versions; however sometimes upstream doesn't give us a choice. See Versioning Policy for how to deal with pre-release versions.
• If LIC_FILES_CHKSUM needs to be changed as part of the upgrade, you must explain exactly why in the commit message. It's fine if it is just a copyright year, formatting or other minor change; however if the license text has changed in more substantially than that it may be that the license is now materially different.