Re: PATCH [0/3]: Simplify the kernel build by removing perl.

Rob Landley
2009-01-04T20:20:36Z

On Sunday 04 January 2009 02:09:31 Sam Ravnborg wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:45:34PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> > Since you're turning down an existing patch in favor of a theoretical
> > patch, I assume you have plans to do this yourself?
>
> If noone else beats me I will do so - yes.

Ok.

> > > And this must be in a single program that can process
> > > all headers in one go so the install process becomes so fast
> > > that we do not worry about if it was done before or not.
> > > Then we can avoid all the .* files in the directory
> > > where we isntall the headers.
> >
> > What if they run out of disk space halfway through writing a file and
> > thus it creates a short file (or a 0 length file where the dentry was
> > created but no blocks could be allocated for the write)?
>
> Then they fail and make will know. Then may leave a file or 100
> but it still failed. At next run everything will be done right
> assuming the culprint has been fixed.

Ok, so the important thing is propagating failures up to the exit code, then?

When making this patch I hit a problem that the exit code of "unifdef" seems
to depend on whether it found anything to remove within the file it was
processing, so when I changed the caller to actually care about its exit code
it spontaneously aborted.

Fixing that probably does require changing unifdef.c.

> > I can try to make the shell version more readable, and more powerful.
> > It's already noticeably faster than the perl version. I have no
> > objections to making unifdef do all of this, I just haven't got any
> > interest either.
>
> I have no interest in merging a shell version.

*shrug* Ok. I await your C version, and have a workable patch meeting my own
needs in the meantime.

Thanks,

Rob