Re: [PATCH] xen: remove the usage of the P ar option

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 31/12/2020 09:20, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 06:32:58PM +0000, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>> On 30/12/2020 17:34, Roger Pau Monne wrote:
>>> It's not part of the POSIX standard [0] and as such non GNU ar
>>> implementations don't usually have it.
>>>
>>> It's not relevant for the use case here anyway, as the archive file is
>>> recreated every time due to the rm invocation before the ar call. No
>>> file name matching should happen so matching using the full path name
>>> or a relative one should yield the same result.
>>>
>>> This fixes the build on FreeBSD.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@xxxxxxxxxx>
>> Acked-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>, although...
>>
>> We really need some kind of BSD build in CI.  This kind of breakage
>> shouldn't get into master to begin with.
> Fully agree. I'm not that familiar with gitlab CI, but since we have
> our own runners there, could we also launch VMs instead of just using
> containers?
>
> It might be easier to integrate with osstest in the future, since
> FreeBSD has now switched to git.
>
>>> [0] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ar.html
>>> ---
>>> I'm unsure whether the r and s options are also needed, since they
>>> seem to only be relevant when updating a library, and Xen build system
>>> always removes the old library prior to any ar call.
>> ... I think r should be dropped, because we're not replacing any files. 
>> However, I expect the index file is still relevant, because without it,
>> you've got to perform an O(n) search through the archive to find a file.
> Right, the description of 's' between opengroup and the Linux man page
> seems to be slightly different. From the opengroup description it seems
> like s should be used to force the generation of a symbol table when
> no changes are made to the archive, but otherwise ar should already
> generate such symbol table.

Ok - are you happy for me to commit with dropping the r and s?

~Andrew