Re: [PATCH 1/3] Improve genmoddep.awk

[Pavel Roskin]

Quoting Bean <address@hidden>:

> Perhaps you could also take a look at my previous patch
>
> [PATCH] Use symbol database to maintain module dependence
>
> It add a program grub-symdb to maintain symbol database and therefore
> eliminate def- and unf- files, it also allows incremental build.

grub-symdb would need to be compiled by a native C compiler.   
Otherwise, it won't work when cross-compiling the utilities.

It's not that it's a big deal per se, but it is will add complexity if  
we try to use autoconf to look for it.

Adding grub-symdb to bin_UTILITIES would result in it being installed  
along with the utilities that are actually used after the build.  I  
think it's wrong.  Temporary build tools don't belong there.

I think awk is a better choice than native C, as it's assumed to be  
available on the build system.  I could rewrite genmoddep.awk in shell  
script, if we want to eliminate awk from the build.  But I'm not sure  
every shell would handle the needed amount of environment variables to  
emulate arrays.  And it would be almost certainly slower.

The awk script could be changed to run nm and to parse output of  
different kinds on nm.  We could probably remove another Apple hack  
from the makefiles by having awk do the parsing.

I think we could specify the dependencies manually and have the script  
check them rather than generate them.  That would mean that no  
dependencies will be created unknowingly.  Chances are it will allow  
more incremental builds.

Going offtopic, another approach to avoid massive rebuilds for minor  
changes would be to ban most typedefs, so that we can use forward  
declarations for structures instead of including files that are  
otherwise unneeded (fresh example: dl.h including elf.h just to use a  
pointer to the structure).

--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin