Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/25] configure: We don't want to clean configuration files

[Peter Maydell]

On 17 July 2018 at 18:05, Juan Quintela <address@hidden> wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrangé <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 01:33:38PM +0200, Juan Quintela wrote:
>>> If you don't want to compile everything, you configure
>>> config-devices.mak.  And then make clean remove it, and make will
>>> create a default one without your configuration.  Fix it by not
>>> removing it.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Juan Quintela <address@hidden>
>>> ---
>>>  Makefile | 2 +-
>>>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>>>
>>> diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
>>> index 2da686be33..2ffbcde323 100644
>>> --- a/Makefile
>>> +++ b/Makefile
>>> @@ -751,7 +751,7 @@ clean:
>>>      if test -d $$d; then $(MAKE) -C $$d $@ || exit 1; fi; \
>>>      rm -f $$d/qemu-options.def; \
>>>          done
>>> -    rm -f $(SUBDIR_DEVICES_MAK) config-all-devices.mak
>>> +    rm -f config-all-devices.mak
>>>
>>>  VERSION ?= $(shell cat VERSION)
>>
>> This feels wrong to me.  If 'make' is creating config-devices.mak, then
>> either 'make clean' or 'make distclean' must remove it. So if you remove
>> it here, it should be added to distclean instead.
>
> I can agree with putting it on distclean.
>
> make don't put it there if it is already there.  My use case is that I
> have several build trees from the same source three:
>
> - x86_64-softmmu with minimal set of devices (the ones that I use)
> - x86_64-softmmu with everything under the sun
> - everything that can be compiled in in fedora
>
> for the 1st case, I am interested that it is fast, so I edit the
> x86_64-softmmu/config-device.mak.  But if I do a make clean for any
> reason, I lost my changes.

I think the problem here is that we're confused about whether
config-devices.mak should be a user-editable file or just
part of our build process. Personally I think we should go
for the latter, ie if there are useful use cases that
currently you need to edit the file to achieve, we should
provide a better mechanism for doing them.

thanks
-- PMM