Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] tools/Makefile: Fix Many Many problems and inconsistencies

[Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>]

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[Slowly catching up on ksummit-discuss]

On Mon, 2016-08-01 at 20:46 -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote:
> and subdir Makefiles.
> 
> Examples:
> 
> Use/honor O=outputdir consistently instead of building in <kerneltree>/tools.
> (check/compare kernel commit bf35182ffcd00d8b36d56210ffdac110e5624d7d)
> 
> Honor MAKEFLAGS (well, they aren't even passed to tools/Makefile AFAICT.
> from an execution log:
> make LDFLAGS= MAKEFLAGS="" O=/local/lnx/kernel/lnx-47/TOOLS subdir=tools -C ../tools/ all
> 
> Use make's "findstring" correctly (see patch below)
> 
> There are lots of other problems unless I have just had too much too drink tonight,
> so here's the TECH TOPIC:
> 
> In a 1.5 hour code crunch session, get a bunch of interested people together to fix
> a lot of problems quickly.  Then I will be a guinea pig tester.  :)
[...]

I don't know how much can be done in that time.  I've had some
recurring pains in packaging tools/:

1. Many different build systems
   - Inconsistent support for configuration variables (not just 'O')
   - usbip isn't included in a recursive build, presumably because
     it uses autotools

2. Tools include UAPI headers in one of two ways, neither of which is
   reliable:
   - Assume the current headers are on the system include path
   - Include unprocessed UAPI headers through a relative path

   The right thing to do is to run 'make headers_install' and add
   usr/ to the front of the system include path.  But we'd want a
   way to avoid re-doing that when the UAPI headers haven't changed.

3. Tools frequently fail to build in stable releases (sometimes on
   specific architectures) - seems like tools/ is not covered by CI
   or it's ignored

This last point is more of a core topic though.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.

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