Re: Does git belong in root's $PATH?

From: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
Date: Jan 7, 2006, 23:01 UTC
Message-ID: <20060107230130.GA8335@mars.ravnborg.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0601071023250.3169@g5.osdl.org>

On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 10:31:52AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> 
> 
> On Sat, 7 Jan 2006, walt wrote:
> >
> > When updated my kernel this morning, the same way I've been doing
> > it for many months, I noticed that the -gxxxxxxx localversion
> > string was missing from the new kernel's name.
> > 
> > I finally figured out that this happened because /usr/local/bin
> > is not in my root's $PATH, and the setlocalversion script depends
> > on git.  (The only thing I do as root is 'make install').
> 
> Ok, sounds like a build buglet to me. If you've done a "make" as a regular 
> user, and just do a "make install" as root, I'd argue that the "make 
> install" should do as little as humanly possible, and literally just 
> install the kernel. If it starts changing the version, that sounds a bit 
> fishy.
> 
> Sam, anything we can do?

Today kbuild uses same method to build KERNELRELEASE no matter what target is used, and I recently committed a change that used git tools as replacement for direct manipulation with .git/* What I did not realise was that we now require git during make install time - which is obviously plain wrong.

I will try to look into a cleaner solution tomorrow where KERNELRELEASE is fetched somewhere else during make install time.

Show 12 quoted lines

> 
> That said:
> 
> > I suppose I'm asking a philosophical question here:  do you
> > guys install git where root can find it (as a system tool)?
> 
> I don't, but I don't use "make install" anyway, I just do "make 
> modules_install". I install the kernel by hand, I always have.
> 
> Of course, that's partly because I've always felt that "make install" does 
> too much (I think "make modules_install" is better - it really only 
> installs the already-built modules).

The big difference here is that "make modules_install" is part of kbuild, whereas "make install" almost just call installkernel which is distribution specific - and the distributions does all sort of stuff in installkernel :-(

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> Maybe it would be best to remove the "vmlinux" dependency from "make 
> install" (so that "make install" will do exactly that: just install).  I 
> think all the documentation already tells you to do a "make" and then a 
> "make install".

I had a short chat with David Miller about something similar. What I really liked to do was to tell user if vmlinux needed an update. But the implmentation of kbuild does make this almost impossible - I have at least not seen how to do it.

When I during early 2.6.12 removed the dependency on vmlinux from the install target people were complaining that there scripts broke and the solution that was implmented was a new target: "make kernel_install" and "make install" got back the vmlinux dependency.

Only difference between the two are that "make kernel_install" does NOT have vmlinux as prerequisite. This was btw only done for i386 and the only other architecture that have kernel_install is parisc with a vmlinux dependency.

So no, I'm very unlikely to remove the vmlinux dependency from the "make install" target - it results in too many suprises.

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> The other make targets really _are_ different: "make fdimage" depends on 
> vmlinux, but that's because it literally just builds the image. "make 
> install" is special.
> 
> Sam, what say you? I forget what the kbuild mailing list is, but maybe 
> you can forward this suggestion there..

These days it is named linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org ;-) kbuild-devel@lists.sourceforge.net is seldom used though I still monitor it. Talked with mec about discontinue it but he liked to keep it araound. He is btw still moderator on that list filtering away all spam.

Sam