Re: KBuild 2.5 Impressions

Kenneth Johansson (ken@canit.se)
31 May 2002 02:13:12 +0200


On Fri, 2002-05-31 at 01:19, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> There is exactly one valid objection I've seen to kbuild 2.5 inclusion,
> and that is the matter of breaking up the patch. Having done a quick
> tour through the whole patch set, I now know that there are some
> easy places to break it up:
>
> - Documentation is a large part of the patch and can be easily
> broken out.
>
> - The makefile parser, complete with state transition tables etc,
> lexer, and so on, breaks out cleanly (sits on top of the db
> utilities).
>
> - Executable programs written in C. Each one ends with a
> 'main' function, and there is the natural division.
>
> - The remaining C code breaks out into a number of separable
> components:
>
> - Utilities such as environment variable parsing, canonical
> name generation, line reading, line editing etc.
> - The database
> - File utilities that use the database (e.g., walk_fs_db)
> - Dependency generation
> - Global Makefile construction (command generation etc)
>
> These tend to be common to a number of the executable programs,
> and so have the nature of library components. They can all go
> under the heading 'lib', and further breakdown is probably not
> necessary.
>
> - The Makefile.in patches seem to be about 30-40% of the whole
> thing, and imho must be applied all at the same time. However,
> they break up nicely across subsystem lines (drivers, fs, etc)
>
> - The per-arch patches are already broken out, and are short.
>
> I think that with these breakups done the thing would be sufficiently
> digestible to satisfy Linus. Now that I think of it, Linus's request
> for a breakup is really an endorsement, and quite possibly Keith took
> it the wrong way. (Keith, by the way, how did I do on the structural
> breakdown? Sorry, I really couldn't spend as much time on it as it
> deserves.)

Maybe I'm the idiot here but what dose this gain you??

The reason to break up a patch is not simply to get more of them. There
is no point in splitting if you still need to use every single one of
them to make anything work.

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