Re: [docs] [PATCH v2] add basic b4 config file

["Antonin Godard" <antonin.godard@bootlin.com>]

On Fri Feb 7, 2025 at 10:53 AM CET, Richard Purdie wrote:
> On Fri, 2025-02-07 at 10:26 +0100, Quentin Schulz via
> lists.yoctoproject.org wrote:
>> At the same time, I've done some shady stuff with b4 for poky where I
>> check (rather **guess**) if the current patch is the last patch in a 
>> series. c.f. 
>> https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/tree/scripts/b4-wrapper-poky.py#n44
>> 
>> > In any case we might also use your container scripts for this
>> > (which I will get
>> > to soon hopefully!).
>> > 
>> 
>> That itself may be adding a lot of time to the test since we need to 
>> compile the container first. Additionally, remember that absolutely
>> NO 
>> message should be output to stdout or stderr by the script otherwise
>> the 
>> check is understood as a fail. I'm wondering if we couldn't add
>> support 
>> for a PIPE between b4 and the scripts so that we can ask it to print 
>> stuff (e.g. "please be patient, this may take a while" and maybe even
>> print some progress). For example, I briefly added some WIP support
>> for 
>> patchtest as prep-perpatch-cmd in OE-Core, but it takes a long time 
>> before returning something, not very user-friendly :/
>
> My view is that any preflight checks should be relatively fast. We
> could ask someone setup an autobuilder in a container and run the whole
> AB test matrix but that would be unfair and crazy! :)
>
> I'm fine with having two levels of checks but I do think we need
> something relatively quick by default else nobody will use it.

After a clean build, for me it takes ~10 to 15 seconds to build the documentation
in html format. Most of the time is taken to index everything, so the output
format doesn't really matter.

So, quite a long build from my perspective. Not sure there's much we can do
about it, though.

We do have sphinx-lint, which takes ~half a second for variables.rst (likely the
biggest file here). So we could perhaps run that against each file the patch
series modifies (per-commit).
We would have to solve the existing issues, though! :)
There are also areas of improvements for this linter, for example enforcing
three spaces for indents, etc. I'm willing to put some time into it, if that's
an option we consider for b4 checking.

Antonin

-- 
Antonin Godard, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com