Sam Ravnborg wrote:
>On Tue, Jun 25, 2002 at 11:34:09PM +1000, Keith Owens wrote:
>
>>One other point: kbuild must not assume that it is running on Linux.
>>Users must be able to build the Linux kernel from _any_ evironment that
>>supports Posix and has a _small_ set of GNU tools. This includes
>>Solaris, Cygwin and other host systems. kbuild must not assume that
>>non-standard tools such as SCM are available. We do not even assume
>>that yacc, lex, loadkeys or Perl are available. These tools may be
>>needed for doing development on certain drivers but kbuild must not
>>require anything beyond gcc and the standard small set of utilities.
>>
>>Bottom line: to support add on code and patch sets kbuild has to do the
>>work itself.
>>
>
>This does in no way stop you from achiving the same functionality
>in a small wrapper script.
>Again, do not clobber kbuild with functionality provided by
>modern widespread tools.
>
I personally think that other tools SHOULD NOT be discounted. They
should be considered if:
a) they are open source and under a free license such as GPL.
b) they are in wide spread use and generally available on every posix
system. eg. I don't know of any system that does not run python or
perl. They are in wide spread use by most developers and I can't see
why they can not be used if deemed fit.
c) it is a more efficient way to get the job done. ie. choose the right
tool for the right job. It's highly debateable whether GNU Make is the
right tool for the build system. It is such and OLD generation of a
dependency maintenance tool with OLD design concepts. I think a moderd
DMT would really improve a lot of the build issues of the linux kernel
(or any project for that matter). I'm not an expert but the one I like
to use is "cook". I know of others too (cake, bake, ...).
Choosing an inappropriate tool and trying to force it to do things it
was not originally designed to do can only lead to more problems (higher
maintenace, lack of clarity, obscure hacking, ...). I don't know if
kbuild-2.5 fits into this category but I my gut feeling is that some of
it probably does. I assume that some of the code that has been written
is custom code for linux. Is this necessary ? Surely in and _ideal_
world the tools should be generic enough to apply to any large project.
Keith has taken on a huge task and has done an excellent job. His goals
are numerous and all of them valid. Well done and I hope this
discussion produces some more improvements for the kernel and
potentially other projects.
Regards,
Brendan Simon.
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