Re: Why :O?

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> This also makes it impossible to tell how far through a build is by
>> simply looking up the current file to the list of .o files in OBJS=,
>> which is how I happened to notice it, but that's a comparatively
>> minor issue; it's not exactly difficult to sort that list.
> That's odd.  I was about to argue it was a good way to have an idea
> how far you are through the build:  "pff, it's still at
> if_something", or "great, it's reached usb stuff".

If there were a close-to-equal number of .o files beginning with each
letter of the alphabet, that might work. :)

> I guess the mileage through the build may vary, but I certainly
> disagree with the word "impossible" in your sentence.

Read the rest of it: "by simply...".  I have a tool that does exactly
that: picks the list of OBJS= out of the Makefile, then watches make
output, giving a nice display of percentage-done based on how far
through the list the current file is; it'd have to sort the list to
work with this paradigm.  (Which is not hard to do, of course, as I
mentioned, though it introduces an ugly incompatability between
kbuildwatch for 4.x-or-later and kbuildwatch for 3.1-or-earlier.)

However, convenience for one-off tools is minor compared to bouncing
all over the kernel source tree.  Just as with "make dependall" in
/usr/src, ISTM that locality just makes sense.  But I hesitate to
remove the :O, even from just my own tree, without knowing why it's
there in the first place.

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