Depending on a specific version of a package

Depending on a specific version of a package

[Hemmo Nieminen]

Hi all,

I was wondering if it was possible to depend on a specific
version of a package? Say, I have the following packages

packageA_1.0.bb

packageB_2.2.bb
packageB_2.3.bb

I then want packageA to depend on packageB-2.2 (say,
packageB-2.3 is not backwards compatible). How could I do this?


I've noticed, that some of the existing recipes in Poky contain
Debian-like dependency definitions like the one below from
meta/recipes-support/gnutls/gnutls.inc. 

DEPENDS = "zlib lzo libtasn1 libgcrypt (>= 1.4.2) libcap"

I expect that this would mean that gnutls depends on version
1.4.2 or higher of package libgcrypt. This would be exactly what
I'm looking for, expect that I haven't been able to get the
desired effect with this. The version information inside the
parentheses seems to be completely ignored. 


I also tried adding a line like

DEPENDS += "packageB-2.2" 

into packageA's recipe, but this made Bitbake to start compiling
both the version I had specified as a dependency and the latest
version of that package and eventually to fail compiling either
one of those. 


Bitbake's manual also suggests using
PREFERRED_VERSION_package-name variable in some .conf file.
However, I'd rather define the version dependency in a recipe
file.


I'm using the latest Poky from Git.

Br,
Hemmo