On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 12:40:26PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 12:30 PM Josh Triplett <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Unlike GCC, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to assume a > > *relatively* recent version of Sparse. > > Yeah, sparse is small and easy to build and installs in your own > ~/bin/ directory by default. > > Anybody who can build the kernel can trivially fetch and build sparse > in seconds. It literally builds from scratch in 2.5s for me. > > I don't think you even need any development packages that you don't > already need for the kernel. Just a C compiler and libc, basically. > > Sure, some parts of sparse can use things like libxml and llvm and > even gtk, but that's for functionality that the "check kernel with > sparse" doesn't even need, and the makefile will automatically disable > them if you don't have it installed. > > So if people are having trouble, just point them to the sparse repo, > and tell them that > > git clone ... > cd sparse > make -j8 > make install > > fixes the issue in 30 seconds. > > Although maybe I'm misstating just how easy sparse is to build and > install, and people have had problems? > I never heard of anyone having a problem to build sparse but I guess that a lot of people just use their distro's version. That said, I'm of course, all for encouraging people to upgrad to a recent version. -- Luc
