Re: [RFC PATCH 3/6] kbuild: convert include and source paths

[Peter Oberparleiter <peter.oberparleiter@de.ibm.com>]

Sam Ravnborg wrote:
> On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 05:24:26PM +0200, Peter Oberparleiter wrote:
>> From: Peter Oberparleiter <peter.oberparleiter@de.ibm.com>
>> 
>> Modify kbuild to convert relative include and source paths to absolute
>> form. Also change the module versioning mechanism to alter object file
>> names only after compiling.
>> 
>> Required by the gcov profiling infrastructure: source paths are
>> referenced by the compiled object files. Using relative paths or
>> object file names which are different from the source name would
>> prevent the gcov tool from finding the corresponding source files.
> 
> For the relative path issue do you really fix this at the right place?
> I would say that teaching gcov tool from where to look would be better.

Actually it is gcc that would need to be changed to only include
absolute paths in compiled object files. While I haven't led that
particular discussion with gcc developers yet, I could imagine that they
would argue that such an option already exists: by specifying only
absolute paths during compilation. Also, any dependency on a future
version of gcc would, in my opinion, greatly reduce the overall
usefulness of this gcov kernel infrastructure.

Would it be acceptable to isolate these changes to kbuild by
if-statements, i.e. use absolute paths only of CONFIG_GCOV is
specified (as Jan Engelhardt suggested)?

>> Also change the module versioning mechanism to alter object file
>> names only after compiling.
> Can I get this as a separate patch please.
> It may be general useful and makes sense to look at alone.

Ok, I will do that.


Regards,
  Peter