After spending some time getting to the bottom of YBD issue 224, I have come to a conclusion that artifact splitting is broken in YBD and I wonder if it's broken at an even deeper level. Pasting my conclusion from the following comment:  https://github.com/devcurmudgeon/ybd/issues/224#issuecomment-225416380 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Artifact splitting needs to be implemented somewhere after system integration commands are run, or alternatively, system integration commands are not an option for split system artifacts. Currently we do something like the following for each artifact we need to build: install_contents(component) // stages the dependencies build(component) // runs commands to build the artifact Here we have a special case in install_contents() which says, if we are going to build a 'system' and splitting rules are active, then only stage some of the system; this is wrong because we need the full system, or an explicitly declared subset of the system which includes everything we're going to need in order to run the system-integration commands. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This might not be completely broken in other definitions build tooling,  but the above also leads me to suspect it is entirely broken, artifact splitting should be performed on an existing system artifact possibly as a part of the deployment. One detail in particular which stands out to me, is the cache key for a system artifact which was created with 'splits'   o Should we be caching artifacts of partial systems ? Why ?   o Is the cache key for a 'runtime' of a system properly created     based on which artifacts are declaratively included via splitting     options ? or do they differ arbitrarily because of some hash on     the current ybd configuration ? I can't currently answer the above, but I think splitting must be  something which one would perform on an existing complete system artifact, and the output of the split should either be a deployment step, or additional artifacts which would be created *after* completing the build of a system. It may make more sense to not have any configuration in ybd.conf for the default-splits, and instead have an option of whether to:   a.) Build split system artifacts   b.) Build split chunk artifacts When building split system artifacts would would get the following example artifacts in *addition* to the base-system-x86_64-generic, which must be built anyway:   base-system-x86_64-generic-runtime - The runtime system artifact   base-system-x86_64-generic-docs    - The docs artifact, always built   base-system-x86_64-generic-dev     - The headers, pkg-config, etc,                                        always However: base-system-x86_64-generic-minimal seems probably irrelevant unless I misunderstand it by it's name, it seems to imply that it might make sense to allow split artifacts to overlap in content, does it ? Would that make sense really ? Not sure, just going from the name, but a "minimal" system sounds like something which needs to include the runtime and some binaries and a kernel, so "minimal" is probably a sort of alias which includes the minimal split categories to get a system booting, not a split category in itself. Any thoughts ? Cheers,     -Tristan