Opened 17 years ago

Closed 17 years ago

#2127 closed task (fixed)

Module-Init-Tools-3.4

Reported by: ken@… Owned by: ken@…
Priority: normal Milestone: 7.0
Component: Book Version: SVN
Severity: normal Keywords:
Cc:

Description

New version, new aggravations (make distclean no longer removes the binaries after the tests, and it needs docbook2man to generate man pages from the sgml. Minor aggravations - it has moved again, to ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jcm/module-init-tools/ .

The 'home page' at kerneltools hasn't been updated in a long time.

I think I've now sorted out the aggravations from this in clfs (heh, LFS can get some benefits from clfs!), and I've got a patch to add formatted man pages (the alternative is to add docbook-utils into LFS - with it's several dependencies (all of BLFS chapter 43), that seems a non-starter).

But, I'm increasingly queasy about instructing people to run the testsuite: It produces binaries which aren't usable in the finished system (they reference environment variables, and seem to be purely designed for testing). I found that out because 'make distclean' still does something, it's just that it's no longer useful, so I ended up installing the test versions, and then wondering why my system wasn't usable (see clfs-dev, December). It seems to me that the testsuite here has now crossed the line from very-occasionally-useful to not-normally-worth-doing.

Change History (7)

comment:1 by ken@…, 17 years ago

Milestone: 7.0

comment:2 by bdubbs@…, 17 years ago

This seems to be a very weak distribution. I looked at several messages from http://dmesg.printk.net/pipermail/mit-devel/ and there are requests for man pages and fixing distclean, but the developer, evidently only one person, responds to the messages, but doesn't implement the requests.

I can't find a current git tree.

The Changelog for 3.4 has no entries. I have no confidence in any of the other support files, README, INSTALL, etc either as they appear to be quite old.

I don't know if it is worthwhile even posting something on the mailing list. Somewhere I saw a request to cc the developer, so it appears that he isn't even subscribed himself.

comment:3 by dnicholson@…, 17 years ago

http://www.kerneltools.org/KernelTools.org http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jcm/module-init-tools/devel/module-init-tools.git

FWIW, Fedora, where the developer works and maintains their package, uses 3.4 basically as is. There are 3 patches, but they're all extra functionality that originated a long time ago.

in reply to:  3 comment:4 by bdubbs@…, 17 years ago

Replying to dnicholson@linuxfromscratch.org:

http://www.kerneltools.org/KernelTools.org

Right. And that page says "The last full release was module-init-tools-3.2", but the last full release is actually 3.4.

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jcm/module-init-tools/devel/module-init-tools.git

I saw that, but how do you get something useful from it? I'd like to see when changes were checked in and what the diffs were. I can't get that from the above link.

FWIW, Fedora, where the developer works and maintains their package, uses 3.4 basically as is. There are 3 patches, but they're all extra functionality that originated a long time ago.

I'm not saying the software doesn't work. I'm saying that the documentation and packaging are terrible.

comment:5 by dnicholson@…, 17 years ago

Yeah, it looks like you'd have to clone it. Here's a mirror repo you can browse for the time being:

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/dbn/module-init-tools.git;a=summary

Looks like there haven't been any commits in a while.

comment:6 by ken@…, 17 years ago

Owner: changed from lfs-book@… to ken@…
Status: newassigned

comment:7 by ken@…, 17 years ago

Resolution: fixed
Status: assignedclosed

Fixed in r8489.

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