[coreboot] romtool and makefile breakage

[Patrick Georgi]

Am 05.04.2009 02:42, schrieb Carl-Daniel Hailfinger:
> No offense intended, but almost every commit intended to fix the build
> since the introduction of romtool broke the build for some boards.
>    
As long as someone works on it, I think it's fine. If problems arise and 
no-one works on fixing them, that's a serious issue and code should be 
rolled back.
That's why this is a development repository. And people who fear that 
their local copy might break can look at the autobuilder.
> It seems the cause of the breakage is not understood.
>
> Can we please require a full _parallel_ abuild on a
> _multicore/multiprocessor_ machine for each "bugfix" before it is committed?
>    
Doesn't necessarily help. Many of my patches were tested exactly that 
way, and they worked fine on _my_ box when built that way. What more 
should I do?
If you want an "tree-always-works" process, I can recommend aegis 
(http://aegis.sf.net)
> "cp" and "cat" should be banned in makefiles. They are not atomic and if
> [...]
>    
> And while we're on the topic of makefile race conditions, please note
> that gcc is smart enough to create output files atomically, but almost
> every other program (romcc, romtool, cat, cp) is not. Non-smart programs
> MUST (in the RFC sense) always output to files not specified in any
> dependency rule. Creating smart programs is hard.
>    
How about just banning make, if it doesn't manage such a trivial thing 
such as looking if the job make itself created finished, before assuming 
that the file is ready to be used?
This isn't rocket science.


Patrick