BitBake is the tool at the heart of the OpenEmbedded build system and is responsible for parsing the metadata, generating a list of tasks from it, and then executing those tasks. To see a list of the options BitBake supports, use the following help command:
$ bitbake --help
The most common usage for BitBake is bitbake <packagename>, where
packagename is the name of the package you want to build
(referred to as the "target" in this manual).
The target often equates to the first part of a .bb filename.
So, to run the matchbox-desktop_1.2.3.bb file, you
might type the following:
$ bitbake matchbox-desktop
Several different versions of matchbox-desktop might exist.
BitBake chooses the one selected by the distribution configuration.
You can get more details about how BitBake chooses between different
target versions and providers in the
"Preferences and Providers" section.
BitBake also tries to execute any dependent tasks first.
So for example, before building matchbox-desktop, BitBake
would build a cross compiler and eglibc if they had not already
been built.
glibc
GNU version of the Unix standard C library. By default, the OpenEmbedded build system
builds with eglibc.
A useful BitBake option to consider is the -k or
--continue option.
This option instructs BitBake to try and continue processing the job as much
as possible even after encountering an error.
When an error occurs, the target that
failed and those that depend on it cannot be remade.
However, when you use this option other dependencies can still be processed.