* Richard Smith smithbone@gmail.com [060730 02:33]:
Issue 1:
The dependency chain of the builds is not correct. I spent close to 2 hours trying to figure out why my code was not working when the problem was that my code was not getting recompiled by romcc.
The SPD code is done in a header file. Pehaps this was the 1st mistake but I copied it from the way another project did it.
If you make changes to that header file they are not picked up properly. So some work on dependency info may be in order.
yes, in the build process auto.inc is only depending on auto.c but in the real world this is not true. To fix this we would probably need to create dependencies with gcc -MM (can we use gcc, or would romcc have to do this? Eric?) I did this dynamically for the flashrom utility a while ago, but for all of LinuxBIOS this would be a major task.
The build output of LinxBIOS is _way_ too noisy. Its extremely difficult to try and see if the code you are working on actually got recompiled.
We need to work on reducing the noise level.
One thing that desperately needs to happen is to pack all the preprocessor macros into a .h file and include it, be it by replacing all of them with a single --include preproc.h.
This has been wasting many hours of my time when the config mechanism decided to calculate some negative offsets that would end up with a compiler line including -DFOO=0x-fff3 leading to really crappy error messages.
The way it is now its a complete waste of time to even look at the compiler warnings. Which has by accident annoyed other people on this list.
Stefan