On Tue, Dec 06, 2022 at 09:03:52PM -0800, Luis Chamberlain wrote: > On Tue, Dec 06, 2022 at 10:02:30PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > On Tue, Dec 6, 2022, at 21:03, Nick Alcock wrote: > > > On 6 Dec 2022, Geert Uytterhoeven uttered the following: > > > Only MODULE_LICENSE invokes MODULE_FILE and thus ends up introducing a > > > KBUILD_MODOBJS entry that triggers things going wrong iff not a module: > > > so only it needs to go out (or be replaced with a variant that doesn't > > > invoke MODULE_FILE, if you want to keep the license in too -- > > > > That sounds like a better alternative > > > > > but if the thing is no longer a standalone entity at all I'm not sure > > > what meaning it could possibly have). > > > > As far as I can tell, the general trend is to make more things modules, > > so there is a good chance that these come back eventually. If the > > information in the MODULE_LICENSE field isn't wrong, I would just > > leave it in there. > > Tooling today uses it though to make a deterministic call on if something > *can* be a module. In particular after commit 8b41fc4454e ("kbuild: create > modules.builtin without Makefile.modbuiltin or tristate.conf") we rely on > the module license tag to generate the modules.builtin file. This in > turn is used to allow modprobe to *not* fail when trying to load a module > which is built-in. > > So we can't just disable the tag for when the code is built-in as *want* > to carry it when modules are built-in, that is the point, to help > userspace with this determination. > > I don't think we want to revert 8b41fc4454e as it means we'd force Kbuild to > traverse the source tree twice. > > Geert's point was not keeping MODULE_LICENSE() but instead the other > MODULE_*() crap for things which are not modules in case in the future > code becomes a module... > > But I don't see the point in keeping things around just in case, if we > want to keep things simple. Just use the SPDX license tag for the license. Or if you really want to keep it just make it an *eye-sore*, and comment it out. I don't see why at build-time we should suffer. Luis