Re: [PATCH v3 6/7] buildtools/chkincs: use a staging directory for headers

[David Marchand <david.marchand@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 25 Sept 2025 at 11:32, Bruce Richardson
<bruce.richardson@intel.com> wrote:
> > > In general looks ok to me.
> > > One small comment though - can we not have "staging" as a top-level
> > > directory, but instead hide it inside the buildtools directory, or even the
> > > chkincs directory? I dislike having too many subdirectories directly off
> > > the root of the project, especially ones purely for internal tooling.
> >
> > Well, at first I was trying to change the whole build process iow rely
> > only on the staging directory and remove all the include_directories:
> > directives from the declare_dependency() objects.
> > Libraries and apps were ok, but there were a *lot* of complications
> > with drivers (what a *huge mess*, especially for NXP drivers with
> > "compat.h" includes, and Marvell drivers to a smaller extent).
> > I may retry in the future with some AI tool that will brute force this :-).
> >
> > For now, I gave up but did not reconsider the location of the staging part.
> > Moving to buildtools is indeed saner as it is only for the check now,
> > and I can also make this staging stuff dependent on the check_includes
> > option now.
> >
>
> I wonder should we just consider making chkincs an install-time job rather
> than a build-time one? We could look to build chkincs using a custom
> install script (meson.add_install_script) after the header copies are
> already done for us. That should cut down on the complexity within the

Not sure I follow, what would this install script look like?
Is it not similar to the makefile solution I proposed previously?


> build system, but it does mean an additional install step to a temporary
> directory to get it to run. However, for use in our CI I don't see why
> having an install step with DEST_DIR set to /tmp shouldn't be feasible.


-- 
David Marchand