compiling your changes

compiling your changes

[Julia Lawall]

Hello all,

There were a couple of remoarks about code that doesn't compile.  To help 
avoid this, always be sure that you have a .o file for every .c file that 
you have changed, and that the .o file is more recent than the .c file.  
Sometimes you can think that you have compiled the kernel, but you have 
not actually compiled the code that you modified, due to configuration 
issues.  If you have made changes that should only have a very local 
effect, such as adding whitespace, it should be safe to just compile the 
file you are working on, with make path/file.o.  If you are doing 
something with a more global effect, such as adding or removing const, 
adding or removing static, etc, then it is probably safe to just compile 
your specific driver, with make path/driver/.  In the latter case, you 
make need to check the configuration options to be sure that your specific 
file will be compiled.

Get in the habit of compiling for every change you make, no matter how 
simple it seems.  It's always possible to accidentally type a strange 
character and end up with something different than what you intended.

julia