[Buildroot] [PATCH 00/30] Splitting the toolchain-external package

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Hello,

On Tue, 25 Oct 2016 16:26:19 +0200, Arnout Vandecappelle wrote:

> > Then all toolchain packages are introduced but are not yet used since
> > the new toolchain-external infra will be added latter.  
> 
>  Meh, I don't like that. You should introduce the infra and then convert the
> toolchains one by one. Or is there some reason why that is difficult?

This is not possible if you want a bisectable patch series. You can't
have some of the toolchains handled by the old stuff, and some of the
toolchains handled by the new stuff, because the entire point of the
series is to replace the toolchain-external package from a real package
to a virtual one. So this has to be done in one go. You can't have the
Linaro toolchain living as a separate package, whose build is triggered
by the toolchain-external virtual package, and at the same time the
Sourcery toolchain handled in the old way, directly within the
toolchain-external package.

I originally did the patch series, and turned this around many times,
and what Romain is proposing here is really the only reasonable way
that I could find.

> > Before introduce the new toolchain-external infra, some specific
> > functions and logic are moved into a separate file (toolchain utility,
> > toolchain wrapper, variables definition, uClibc, musl and bfin).  
> 
>  This part I don't like either. For me, splitting into separate files
> *decreases* readability and ease of use, because you have to consult these
> different files to understand what's going on. Splitting is useful when:
>  - there is a really clear separation of concerns (e.g. pkg-cmake and
> pkg-autotools are clearly unreleated);
>  - or the same "code" is "called" from several places (e.g. the pkg-generic
> infra is used both by pkg-cmake and pkg-autotools);
>  - or the file becomes really large (top-level Makefile is more than 1000 lines).
> 
>  For me, pkg-toolchain-external*.mk is all really closely related so it can go
> in one file.
> 
>  In addition, I don't like that all these pkg-toolchain-external*.mk files are
> included in no particular order from the top-level Makefile with 'include
> toolchain/*/*.mk'. In fact pkg-toolchain-external.mk defines
> toolchain-external-package and it gets used by toolchain-external.mk (that
> includes toolchain/toolchain-external/*/*.mk). So if toolchain-external.mk
> happens to get read before pkg-toolchain-external.mk, things will fail
> miserably. I believe we've had problems with that before, haven't we?
> 
>  So, my proposal would be to either keep everything together in
> toolchain-external.mk, or move pkg-toolchain-external.mk one level up (then it
> gets included before toolchain/*/*.mk).

I'm personally fine with your proposal, we can keep everything in
pkg-toolchain-external.mk, both the infrastructure itself and all its
helper functions.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
http://free-electrons.com