[OpenAFS-devel] support for enterprise kernel

[Neulinger, Nathan]

Before going to any great lengths on rewriting that makefile, please wait
till Derrick gets my makefile cleanup patches applied. (Derrick, are you
still intending to do those, or are you holding off cause of the NT stuff?)

They are widespread and covering most of the makefiles in project. 

Once that is done, the makefiles should be a bit cleaner, and should then be
alot simpler to rework for better build process.

-- Nathan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sam Hartman [mailto:hartmans@mekinok.com]
> Sent: Monday, August 20, 2001 11:31 AM
> To: Derek Atkins
> Cc: Thomas Mueller; openafs-devel@openafs.org
> Subject: Re: [OpenAFS-devel] support for enterprise kernel
> 
> 
> warlord and I talked about this for a while and I understand my
> position much better.  My concern was not so much raw complexity as
> isolation of components.  This change is clearly Redhat specific and
> is going into a makefile that is used by all Linux-based oses.
> 
> 
> This is a problem because I don't believe that Makefile is well
> designed at present and adding more cruft will only make it worse.  In
> particular I am annoyed by the libafs target conditional (the series
> of elifs) which has to be modified each time you add a new target.
> Having code from multiple different oses (where Redhat is an OS)
> concentrated in such a small chunk of code leads to unmaintainability.
> 
> I believe that especially if we want to depend on GNU Make there is a
> better way of structuring the kernel build makefiles that allows for
> OS-specific expansion.  In particular, you could include an
> OS/packaging specific makefile fragment that is allowed to set a
> LOCAL_TARGETS variable.  Then you have all depend on targets set by
> configure as well as the local targets.  
> 
> Then you take advantage of the ability to scope variable assignments
> to a rule.  You can do something like:
> 
> libafs.ep.o:  SMP_DEFS=blah blah blah
> 
> That means that SMP_DEFS  is set/overridden for libafs.ep.o and I
> think for its dependencies (if I understand the docs correctly).  
> 
> However, restructuring the makefiles this way is a fair bit of work.
> I think it is justified in the long term, especially if we ever get
> other os-specific patches to the Linux build system.  I think it would
> be too much work to ask people to do in order to support ep kernels
> now.  So I tend to think that at the current time the tradeoffs favor
> the existing solution.  I do ask that we keep an eye on the Linux
> kernel makefiles and as people start trying to change it more, we ask
> that they leave it cleaner than they left it.
> 
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