From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2013 00:26:14 +0100 Subject: [Buildroot] [RFC] Removing CLEAN_CMDS and UNINSTALL_(STAGING|TARGET)_CMDS In-Reply-To: <201302082349.42455.yann.morin.1998@free.fr> References: <1360363083-28747-1-git-send-email-thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com> <201302082349.42455.yann.morin.1998@free.fr> Message-ID: <20130209002614.5568c197@skate> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Dear Yann E. MORIN, On Fri, 8 Feb 2013 23:49:42 +0100, Yann E. MORIN wrote: > > That said, it is true that the -clean target might be useful for > > some use cases. > > What about your pending out-of-tree package build? I see it as a very > easy way to clean a package: remove the build-dir altogether. Thus, we > still have the ability to '-clean' a package, whithout a requirement > on the package to provide any _CMDS for it. Agreed. If we have a infrastructure-based way of supporting make -clean, then I'm all for it. But as you say, it still means that the _CLEAN_CMDS would no longer exist. > > However, is -uninstall really useful, considering > > that it doesn't take into account the removal of the reverse > > dependencies? > > Not easily doable, so probably error-prone on the user side. However, > how many issues have been reported on this? I guess the volume was has > been pretty low, so either users do not use it, or are not aware of it, > or expect it to break and manually ensure coherency. > > For the two first categories, they won't miss it if/when we remove it. > For the latter category, I doubt they are many, so will probably not > whine too much if/when we remove it. The main problem I see with _UNINSTALL_..._CMDS is that we have never been asking for them when reviewing packages. Sometimes new packages have them, sometimes not. And I haven't seen any of these commands being updated/fixed in any package, which to me is an indication that nobody uses them in practice. > My stance on the subject is: > - pkg-clean can be achieved in a better, safer, more systematic way > with your out-of-tree package build, so we can/should remove any > _CLEAN_CMDS; > - pkg-uninstall is inherently broken, and there is no easy, sustainable > way to implement it, so we can/should remove it. I agree with your summary. Thanks for this feedback, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux development, consulting, training and support. http://free-electrons.com