[RFC] Updating busybox config/build system to match current kernel system

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Thu Aug 31 20:14:56 UTC 2006


On Thursday 31 August 2006 1:38 pm, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > 
>  > I tried to replace our current makefiles and config system.
> 
> i've been having to skip a lot of messages lately.  can you enumerate
> the reasons for replacing the current makefiles?  i didn't think
> they were all that broken.
> 
> what problem is this solving?

Well to start with, I've made scripts/bb_mkdep segfault on several occasions, 
and it doesn't recalculate the dependencies until _after_ the build runs so 
if you do something that changes the dependencies and rerun the build, the 
build runs using the old dependencies.  (Plus when I make symlinks to busybox 
in the testing directory and such, and then do a "make clean" which deletes 
busybox, on the next build it dumps warnings about those symlinks not 
pointing to anything even though they're not pointed to by anything in the 
build system.  It's doing a find and processing every file it hits.  I've 
made chroot environments in a subdir under busybox with proc and sys mounted 
in them and if you run the build without cleaning up that subdirectory first 
the dependency generator goes positively bananas when it hits those...)

That's one thing.

>  > I am intimidated by deep Makefile wizardry,
>  > and therefore I cowardly took kernel's one instead of fixing the one
>  > which we have now.
> 
> hmm.  i've always thought kernel's makefiles were a fine example of
> "Makefile wizardry".  simple, they're not.

Yeah, but they're well maintained, we don't have to do it, and there are 
already more people who understand the kernel's makefiles than will ever 
bother to learn the intricacies of BusyBox's.

I'm all for reinventing the wheel when we can do a better wheel, but not for 
the parts of the build infrastructure that don't wind up in the resulting 
binary.

That said, I still need to review and test the patch...

> paul

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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