Re: Dates in boot loaders on !x86

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 09:41:49PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 09:39:58PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
>  > > That's unnecessarily complicated. There's prior art for this:
>  > > [...]
>  > 
>  > Please look at the mail that started this threat.  newvers provides
>  > multiple independent variable, so conditionally providing one of them
>  > needs both an option and output mangling in the users.
> 
> It doesn't need an option, because on a clean build it would always be
> 0 (or 1) -- if you start hacking, then it would increment
> itself. Assuming you don't cleandir.
> 
> (And I didn't say to reuse the kernel's newvers script itself. All this
> needs is about five lines of sh...)

It would also increment if something else changed, so the the result of
an incremental build after cvs up would be different from a fresh build.

>  > The consensus seems to be that during normal usage, the build date is
>  > irrelevant and doesn't provide any value. Based on Martin's suggestion,
>  > I will add a MKVERBOSEBOOT variable or so (haven't made my mind up about
>  > the name). If it is set, bootprog_kernrev will include the build date as
>  > well as user and host name (like the current bootprog_maker). The
>  > current bootprog_maker and bootprog_kernrev go away.
> 
> But anyway, that seems fine. Is it going to be extended to the x86
> bootloader?

Yes, x86 is using bootprog_kernrev.

Joerg