new experimental building system

I received some comments from some developers that wanted to test their drivers with the latest -stable kernel. After thinking for a while, I decided to do a small test, packaging the current build system into a separate tree, without any drivers, and providing a way to allow using it with the latest driver.

I added it at:
http://git.linuxtv.org/mchehab/new_build.git

The current version is very raw, but people are free to send patches to improve it.

Usage:

git clone git://linuxtv.org/mchehab/new_build.git
cd new_build/linux
make tar DIR=<some dir with media -git tree>
make untar
cd ..

After that, it will work like the old -hg build system.

Notes:

1) There's not much compat stuff here. So, it will likely not work with legacy kernels. It will probably be fine to use it with the latest stable kernel, although I tested it only with 2.6.36-rc7.

2) For now, this is just an experience. I don't intend to maintain any out-of-tree building system, due to my lack of time for it. If this interests someone, feel free to candidate to maintain it.

3) It shouldn't be hard to support legacy kernels. All that it is needed is to have patches adding backports that don't fit at compat.h, and let the building system to apply them, depending on the kernel version.

If someone manifests interests on maintaining it, we probably may have some script at linuxtv.org, generating daily tarballs with the latest drivers, to be used by this build system.

Cheers,
Mauro

Em 17-10-2010 14:29, Mauro Carvalho Chehab escreveu:

I added several patches today to the new experimental building system, and added a script at linuxtv.org to auto-generate a tarball with the latest drivers.

Basically, with the patches I made, it is compiling fine with the following kernel releases (vanilla upstream kernels):

	linux-2.6.32.24
	linux-2.6.33.7
	linux-2.6.34.7
	linux-2.6.35.7
	linux-2.6.36

(e. g. the latest stable releases from 2.6.32 to 2.6.36).

The 2.6.32 backport also compiled fine with the experimental RHEL6 kernel I have on my machine.

WARNING: I just test compilation. There are some random warnings generated with some of those kernels that may or may not indicate a problem.

If you want to test the new building system, all you need to do is:

	$ git clone git://linuxtv.org/mchehab/new_build.git
	$ cd new_build
	$ ./build.sh

This will download the newest tarball from linuxtv.org, apply the backport patches and build it.

After that, you may install the new drivers with:

	$ make install

The building system is the same as we had on the mercurial tree, but I didn't test the other targets (well, except for make release DIR=<dir> - it is also working fine). Yet, I think that the other make targets should be working properly.

Patches (and a maintainer) are welcome.

Have fun!
Mauro.