Introducing the v2.7 Release of the Yocto Project Extension for VS Code

What’s new?

We’re happy to announce the release of v2.7.0, which includes a few new features as well as bug fixes. Check out the summarized changelog below:

Global environment files scan

So far we provided a “Recipe Scan” feature that allowed you to see:

• Variables values on hover
• Variables definitions and local references

This feature was restricted for recipe files (.bb,.bbappend,.inc). In the default configuration, as long as you configured your bitbake environment, the “Parse on Save” setting would automatically refresh this scan whenever you saved such files.

We have extended the support for environment scans to global configuration files (.conf). You can now also have access to variables values and definitions inside these files. Similarly, if “Parse on Save” is active, this new command will automatically be run. Otherwise, you may manually trigger these scans by using the “Bitbake: Scan global env” command that will take place of the “Recipe scan” command depending on the file context.

Skipped recipes

Some bitbake recipes will only be available to be built if some DISTRO_FEATURES are enabled. bitbake-layers show-recipes will report them with a “skip” reason. So far, we excluded such recipes from our project environments. As suggested by Github user Paullgk, sometimes we might want to build those recipes so it would be useful to bring them into our various views, along with the skip reason. This will allow understanding why they are not available and fix it.

As illustrated above, these recipes are now brought into scope of the recipes explorer, and all bitbake commands. Although if you try to build them right away, of course you will get an error message explaining that the recipe is currently skipped (and why!). We already report the skip reason in the UI so you probably will already have a good idea of what’s wrong. If multiple .bb definitions exist in your workspace, we only report the one that is considered as the version to be built by Bitbake. The other recipe files are dismissed but actually reported by bitbake-layers. If the need arises, we could add those less prioritized files as well with a warning sign too.

What’s next?

Our current feature goals for the future is to improve the initial user experience when opening new workspaces. We are considering to implement the latest `setup-layers` fetcher that officially hit The Yocto Project master branch recently. We also have a few edge cases bugs under our radar.

If you have any ideas for new features or bugs to fix, we are very much looking for your suggestions! Make sure to contact us on our GitHub page!

Links and resources

• Install the extension from the VS Code extension marketplace
• Contribute to the extension on our Github Repository
• Check out the presentation from Yocto Project Summit 2023.11v
• Check out the extension at Open-VSX Marketplace: Yocto-bitbake
• Test it out in other IDEs through this guide