[H-GEN] Rebuilding kernel modules

[Greg Black]

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Steven McIntyre wrote:

|   When making minor changes, skip the "make dep; make clean" steps.

In general, when building moderately complex software systems
such as Unix-type kernels, skipping steps is fraught with danger
unless you happen to understand the interaction between the bits
you've changed -- and even the people who write the code make
mistakes here, so having that knowledge is not a sufficient
factor on its own.

A common outcome is to build a system that builds, links, and
maybe boots but then exhibits instability.  This is not a good
thing.  An alternate scenario has it fail at boot, which is
better although it can be very irritating.  Best of all is if it
fails to build or link and produces gazillions of warnings and
error messages that are largely incomprehensible, although that
then results in lots of "please help me" messages to lists like
this.

The best thing is to use your fastest box (assuming you have
more than one) to do all your compiling and to do it the careful
way every time.  If that means you have to wait forever for a
compile, maybe you could try to arrange for somebody at a Humbug
meeting to do the build and then allow you to do an install over
the network.

I'm well aware that, despite all the warnings from boring old
farts like me, plenty of people take shortcuts and end up with
systems that appear to run correctly.  You are free to make that
choice too, of course -- just don't be surprised if it bites you
when you least expect it.

Greg

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