From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2016 16:24:17 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] [v1 1/1] uboot: Add local directory option to menuconfig In-Reply-To: <87por1q1ps.fsf@dell.be.48ers.dk> References: <1466994356-15411-1-git-send-email-Aduskett@gmail.com> <20160627205746.GC3714@free.fr> <87por1q1ps.fsf@dell.be.48ers.dk> Message-ID: <20160628162417.421cc3cb@free-electrons.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Hello, On Tue, 28 Jun 2016 08:14:39 +0200, Peter Korsgaard wrote: > >> If your concern is to be able to use a local source during development, > >> we have the override-srcdir mechanism just for that. See in the > >> menuconfig, in the "Build options" sub-menu: > >> > >> ($(CONFIG_DIR)/local.mk) location of a package override file > >> > > Interesting! However I was not aware of this feature and I would suspect > > most users won't know about it because it's not in menuconfig. For local > > development why would this be a bad thing? > > I agree that it isn't an obvious feature and that it is easy to miss. As > Yann said, systems like Buildroot are really about reproducability, so > referring to something local on the developers machine doesn't match > very well. This is only if you use Buildroot solely as a "final integration" tool. But lots of people use Buildroot even during active development on a given software component. In such a situation, people are ready to trade "reproducibility" against "ease of building/testing a new change". You certainly don't want to push to your kernel tree a new commit, change your Buildroot configuration, pay the price of a completely new kernel clone + build, to test each and every change you make to your kernel. The kernel, U-Boot and other bootloaders are somewhat special components, as you often need HW-specific versions of those. This is why we have the possibility of specifying custom Git versions, custom tarballs, etc. From that perspective, having a way to specify a local directory is also not a bad idea. To me the _OVERRIDE_SRCDIR / local.mk thing is meant to be _local_ to the developer machine. It's meant to only be used while hacking on a given package, and at the end, produce a patch, or commit your changes. I am not a big fan of suggesting people to version control their local.mk, but maybe it's just a matter of taste (and improper name for this local.mk). So in the end, I am not as clear cut as you and Yann are about rejecting the U-Boot "local directory" patch and removing the similar functionality from Linux. Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering http://free-electrons.com