running "make clean" in xfsprogs doesn't wipe mkfs/*.o files

running "make clean" in xfsprogs doesn't wipe mkfs/*.o files

[Theodore Tso]

I recently ran into an issue where "make clean" (or "make realclean")
in the xfsprogs sources isn't deleting the *.o files in the mkfs
directory.

This is causing a problem because I first build xfsprogs for arm64,
and then I build it for x86_64, with a "make realclean" between.  The
fact that object files in the mkfs directory aren't getting cleaned
results in build failures.  This wasn't happening before when I was
building on a different build machime, but it's pretty clear the
problem is for soem reasone "make clean" isn't deleting the object
files in mkfs.

I tried to debug xfsprogs's makefiles, but it wasn't immediately
obvious, so I thought I would just file a report and hope someone can
take a look at it.

In the meantime, I'll work around it by adding a "find . -type f -name
\*.o -print0 | xargs -0 rm" to my test appiance build script.  Which
should work, but it seems really unfortunate that it's necessary.

Thanks,

					- Ted

Re: running "make clean" in xfsprogs doesn't wipe mkfs/*.o files

[Christoph Hellwig]

I don't have an answer either, and haven't seen this one in particular,
but the xfsprogs build system is special at best or broken if you want
to be frank.  A while ago I started on a ninja + meson port as that
seems to be build system of choice for many low-level tools.  I didn't
really have time to do more than a minimal demo, buf if someone wants
to move to a less broken build system I'd be 100% supportive.

Re: running "make clean" in xfsprogs doesn't wipe mkfs/*.o files

[Andrey Albershteyn]

On 2026-09-27 22:44:18, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> I don't have an answer either, and haven't seen this one in particular,
> but the xfsprogs build system is special at best or broken if you want
> to be frank.  A while ago I started on a ninja + meson port as that
> seems to be build system of choice for many low-level tools.  I didn't
> really have time to do more than a minimal demo, buf if someone wants
> to move to a less broken build system I'd be 100% supportive.

Yeah, ninja+meson would be nice, whole probing system would be much
simpler.

-- 
- Andrey