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Comment by allo37 | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly impressed by how...well it works. Considering it's building an entire, totally custom Linux distro from scratch it requires a surprisingly little amount of hand-holding.

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I agree. I don't understand how people prefer buildroot. Buildroot feels like an adhoc system of glued together Makefiles, whereas yocto actually feels like it was built for purpose.

Yocto feels like a ball of mud duct taped together, but thankfully has good documentation. It reminds me of CMake. Buildroot is nice for relatively simple situations. Nixos is arguably better than both.

Their idiosyncrasies may look similar, but CMake has a much stronger skeleton of core algorithms and data structures for a build system than Bitbake. Specifically, as I mentioned in another reply, Bitbake does not model dependencies correctly. CMake does.

Can you elaborate a bit on the dependency-handling topic? I've always thought that Bitbake's dependency handling worked pretty well. It only has package-level granularity, but is quite good within that context.

As of five years ago when I last used it:

Bitbake doesn't model all changes that affect packages, so after certain changes, some packages that should be rebuilt, aren't. It is especially prone to happen when changing Bitbake variables (example: MACHINE_FEATURES), and these are a quite common way to change things about the image being built.

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