Are Yocto Releases Backwards Compatible?

Question

I have a Yocto build environment setup and working off of the OpenEmbedded Rocko 2.4 branch. I would like to include DirectVNC as part of my output image, but the recipe that I find is from the master branch here:

https://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/recipe/59795/

When I include everything and initiate a bitbake for my image, everything starts to compile okay but I receive the following error when it starts to compile DirectVNC.

configure: error: **** pkg-config not found. See http://pkgconfig.sourceforge.net

I know the build environment has pkg-config installed, specifically version 0.23.

Is this a result of mixing Yocto releases? How come the config script cannot find pkg-config?

Answer 1

This is because the recipe doesn't inherit pkgconfig (so doesn't depend on pkgconfig-native). You can simply solve this by adding inherit pkgconfig to the recipe, but that and the fact that the recipe hasn't been touched since 2015 are indicators that the recipe may yet have more problems.

Basically, the last two releases are a lot stricter with dependencies, which has exposed a lot of bugs in recipes.