Re: [PATCH 3/4] kbuild: slim down package for building external modules

Jeffrey Hugo
2025-02-18T20:25:57Z

On 7/27/2024 1:42 AM, Masahiro Yamada wrote:
> Exclude directories and files unnecessary for building external modules:
>
> - include/config/ (except include/config/auto.conf)
> - scripts/atomic/
> - scripts/dtc/
> - scripts/kconfig/
> - scripts/mod/mk_elfconfig
> - scripts/package/
> - scripts/unifdef
> - .config

Please revert this (the removal of .config).

I got some strange reports that our external module install broke, and
traced it to this change. Our external module references the .config
because we have different logic for the build depending on if other,
related modules are present or not.

Also, it looks like this broke DKMS for some configurations, which not
only impacts DKMS itself [1] but also downstream projects [2].

While DKMS may be updated going forward to avoid this issue, there are
plenty of affected version out in the wild.

Also, I haven't surveyed every distro, but it looks like Ubuntu still
packages the .config with their headers in their upcoming "Plucky"
release based on 6.12. I suspect they wouldn't do that if they didn't
feel it was needed/useful.

-Jeff

[1]: https://github.com/dell/dkms/issues/464
[2]: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/issues/1654