[Devel] Re: [PATCH] Move kasprintf.o to obj-y

[Andrew Morton]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:09:48 +0100 Christoph Hellwig <hch at infradead.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 09:59:49AM +0200, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
> > > Please kill lib-y while you're at it.  It's useless and a constant
> > > source of pain like this.
> > Kernel-bloat is another "constant source of pain".
> > But the troubles are that increased blot does not result in compiler erros.
> > 
> > And your proposal to kil lib-y is a counter-act here.
> 
> Killing lib-y doesn't create kernel bloat if done right.  Just introduce
> proper Kconfig dependencies for the truely optional parts.  But if you
> look at the list of objects in lib-y you'll see that they fall in basically
> three categories:
> 
>  (1) always used by core code - should be obj-y
>  (2) generic implementation for arch-specific functionality, should be
>      guarded by Kconfig for clarity reasons anyway
>  (3) library code often but not always used by code that's not always
>      built in.  Here we run into the move to obj-y to avoid compiler
>      warning when used as module issue all the time.  Adding a CONFIG
>      for the bigger onces actually avoids bloat over obj-y here, and
>      when it's small enough obj-y is a lot safer in the presence of
>      modular users
> 
> Really, trying to use the old static library use on demand concept simply
> doesn't fit the way the kernel is built with it's modules and dependencies.

yup, it duplicates what the config system does and is a common source of
problems.