[ANNOUNCE] new experimental building system

[ANNOUNCE] new experimental building system

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

I received some comments from some developers that wanted to test their drivers
with the latest -stable kernel. After thinking for a while, I decided to do
a small test, packaging the current build system into a separate tree, without
any drivers, and providing a way to allow using it with the latest driver.

I added it at:
	http://git.linuxtv.org/mchehab/new_build.git

The current version is very raw, but people are free to send patches to improve it.

Usage:

git clone git://linuxtv.org/mchehab/new_build.git
cd new_build/linux
make tar DIR=<some dir with media -git tree>
make untar
cd ..

After that, it will work like the old -hg build system.

Notes:

1) There's not much compat stuff here. So, it will likely not work with
   legacy kernels. It will probably be fine to use it with the latest stable
   kernel, although I tested it only with 2.6.36-rc7.

2) For now, this is just an experience. I don't intend to maintain any
   out-of-tree building system, due to my lack of time for it. If this interests
   someone, feel free to candidate to maintain it.

3) It shouldn't be hard to support legacy kernels. All that it is needed is
   to have patches adding backports that don't fit at compat.h, and let the
   building system to apply them, depending on the kernel version.

If someone manifests interests on maintaining it, we probably may have some
script at linuxtv.org, generating daily tarballs with the latest drivers, to
be used by this build system.

Cheers,
Mauro

Re: [ANNOUNCE] new experimental building system

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

Em 17-10-2010 14:29, Mauro Carvalho Chehab escreveu:
> I received some comments from some developers that wanted to test their drivers
> with the latest -stable kernel. After thinking for a while, I decided to do
> a small test, packaging the current build system into a separate tree, without
> any drivers, and providing a way to allow using it with the latest driver.
> 
> I added it at:
> 	http://git.linuxtv.org/mchehab/new_build.git
> 
> The current version is very raw, but people are free to send patches to improve it.
> 
> Usage:
> 
> git clone git://linuxtv.org/mchehab/new_build.git
> cd new_build/linux
> make tar DIR=<some dir with media -git tree>
> make untar
> cd ..
> 
> After that, it will work like the old -hg build system.
> 
> Notes:
> 
> 1) There's not much compat stuff here. So, it will likely not work with
>    legacy kernels. It will probably be fine to use it with the latest stable
>    kernel, although I tested it only with 2.6.36-rc7.
> 
> 2) For now, this is just an experience. I don't intend to maintain any
>    out-of-tree building system, due to my lack of time for it. If this interests
>    someone, feel free to candidate to maintain it.
> 
> 3) It shouldn't be hard to support legacy kernels. All that it is needed is
>    to have patches adding backports that don't fit at compat.h, and let the
>    building system to apply them, depending on the kernel version.
> 
> If someone manifests interests on maintaining it, we probably may have some
> script at linuxtv.org, generating daily tarballs with the latest drivers, to
> be used by this build system.

I added several patches today to the new experimental building system, and added
a script at linuxtv.org to auto-generate a tarball with the latest drivers.

Basically, with the patches I made, it is compiling fine with the following kernel
releases (vanilla upstream kernels):
	linux-2.6.32.24
	linux-2.6.33.7
	linux-2.6.34.7
	linux-2.6.35.7
	linux-2.6.36

(e. g. the latest stable releases from 2.6.32 to 2.6.36).

The 2.6.32 backport also compiled fine with the experimental RHEL6 kernel I have on
my machine.

WARNING: I just test compilation. There are some random warnings generated with some
of those kernels that may or may not indicate a problem.

If you want to test the new building system, all you need to do is:

	$ git clone git://linuxtv.org/mchehab/new_build.git
	$ cd new_build
	$ ./build.sh

This will download the newest tarball from linuxtv.org, apply the backport patches
and build it.

After that, you may install the new drivers with:
	$ make install

The building system is the same as we had on the mercurial tree, but I didn't test the
other targets (well, except for make release DIR=<dir> - it is also working fine).
Yet, I think that the other make targets should be working properly.

Patches (and a maintainer) are welcome.

Have fun!
Mauro.