Re: Default NO_CLEAN=yes in 15+

On Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 1:58 PM John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> wrote:

> The buildworld and buildkernel targets include a "clean" step before
> building
> objects dating back before my time to 'make world' (I haven't looked to see
> how far back it goes).  To permit incremental builds, this step can be
> skipped
> via NO_CLEAN=yes.  This step is a bit unusual in build systems however.
> Most
> build systems have separate commands for building vs cleaning (e.g. 'make
> all'
> vs 'make clean') and over time FreeBSD's build system has gained dedicated
> clean targets as well (cleanworld and cleankernel).  For myself, I always
> use NO_CLEAN=yes when building worlds and kernels.  If I need a clean build
> I use the dedicated clean targets (e.g. cleanworld) first.  In particular,
> cleanworld/cleankernel are far more efficient since they use a single
> recursive 'rm' whereas the "clean" step involves a full tree walk with
> nested make invocations of the 'cleandir' target.
>
> A few years ago, Ed Maste added a MK_CLEAN option to src.opts.mk to as a
> WITH/WITHOUT knob for the "clean" step similar to NO_CLEAN=yes.  To
> preserve
> existing behavior this knob currently defaults to on, but I know Ed's goal
> was to eventually flip the default so that NO_CLEAN builds would be the
> default.  I would like us to do that starting in 15.
>
> Further off, I would suggest that we remove the "clean" step outright,
> perhaps in 16.x.  Regardless, we will need to update documentation to
> prefer the clean targets over WITH_CLEAN=yes if our docs do not do this
> already.
>

+1

On the one condition that NO_CLEAN will be silently ignored after...

Warner

> --
> John Baldwin
>
>