I was thinking about my issue described here [1], and discovered the variables called COMPATIBLE_MACHINE and COMPATIBLE_HOST, which "you can use to stop recipes from being built
for machines (/hosts) with which the recipes are not compatible". And so I wondered if it would make sense to add COMPATIBLE_IMAGE, for a similar purpose.
Let me explain my issue: I define different images in different layers (say `first-project-image` and `second-project-image`), and in each of those layers I create `.bbappends` to configure some packages. Typically `hostapd` is used by both images, but with a different config file.
The thing is that when I run `bitbake first-project-image`, because `second-project-image` is part of my bblayers.conf, then the hostapd_%.bbappend from `second-project-image` is used and may have an impact on `first-project-image`, which I don't want. I really want this bbappend to only affect the image `second-project-image`.
One way I can see to deal with that is to realize that `first-project-image` and `second-project-image` are two different projects, and build them from two different BUILDDIRs. The thing I don't like here is that all the packages are therefore downloaded and built twice, which seems like a loss of time and space.
That's where I thought about COMPATIBLE_IMAGE. In the hostapd_%.bbappend of `first-project-image`, I would set "COMPATIBLE_IMAGE = 'first-project-image'", and similarly for "COMPATIBLE_IMAGE = 'second-project-image'". So that I could still share a BUILDDIR between different projects.
How bad of an idea is that?
Thanks in advance,
Jonas