Hi, I'm wondering about the options when I want to make a release, and would like some insight into the build process.
Background: During a release's lifetime, I want to create a set of new installation tarballs for -stable, to be able to (re-) install machines with all relevant patches already included right from the start. In the following, I assume a build machine, which is already mostly, or completely, up to date and/or not directly connected to the Internet. In FAQ#5, I read this (abbreviated): 1. cvs update 2. create and boot a new kernel 3. clean out cruft 4. make obj 5. make distib-dirs 6. make build 7. divert DESTDIR and make release What I wonder is whether some of these steps can be skipped within a release, which would result in big savings in compile time. For one, I expect (but don't know) that the kernel api does not change during a release, and thus generally to be able to skip step 2. Secondly, step 5+6 should also be roughly NOPs within a release, except for the cases where the toolchain is affected. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between steps 6 and 7, though, which take up by far the most amount of time. If you also want to explain why "make" needs step 3, which is also very slow on my machine(s), instead of properly updating the object files, I'm all ears, too. Thirdly, I'm interested in whether steps 4-6 can be collapsed into one step. TIA! Kind regards, --Toni++
