How to use DEPENDS in bitbake

Adding recipe1 to recipe2by

DEPENDS += "recipe1"

should work fine for you. The line above means that before the do_configure task of recipe2 can be run, the task do_populate_sysroot fro mrecipe1 will have completed. This should work for all version of bitbake and OpenEmbedded.

You can achieve something similar to DEPENDS += "recipe1" by

do_configure[depends] += "recipe1:do_populate_sysroot"

If necessary, you could manually set up your own custom depends like this.

The fact is that

DEPENDS += "recipe1"

Works nearly always but not always. Because it binds to do_configure that may be not called in the other image, like for example an initramfs image.

So for these cases better to bind to a task that is used, with

do_rootfs[depends] = "my-initramfs-image:do_image"