[patch] Enhancements for deblob-2.6.30

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Sep  1, 2009, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez <ruben at gnu.org> wrote:

> Attached is a patch to the latest (2.6.30.5) deblob script, it enhances
> the error handling mechanisms, adding some double checks that allow you
> to run it over a non-matching kernel version.

Thanks, I'm adding most of this to 2.6.31-libre1.

> - If a file is not found, it will search for it and warn you.

I don't really see the point of this, let alone trying to apply the fix
on an anternate file.  There are cases of files with the same basename,
and we don't want to mess with that.  To me this seems like making the
version-specific script less robust, so I'd rather not do that.

> - If a variable isn't found in a Makefile, it will search in the others.

Likewise.

> - Several changes were made to avoid change attempts against missing
> files. No empty files (or .deblob empty copies) are created now.

Thanks, installed.

> - The deblob script should be runnable multiple times without harm.

I don't see the point, but this is not the first time I get changes
along these lines, so I took these.

> - die(), fatal() and --force handling rewritten, die calls changed.

Thanks, taken.

> - It will only print "removed blobs" and other messages when they are
> actually done, instead of showing both success and failure messages.

Thanks.

> - A simple dev_name macro was added, for compatibility with kernels
> prior to 2.6.25. This needs to be tested, it might need a conditional.

I don't see how using a deblob-kver for the wrong kernel version could
do any good.  Each version of Linux requires slightly different changes,
and using the wrong version will mostly just get you slightly broken
fixes.  I don't see how this could be better than using the right
deblob-<kver> script.

The fact that we don't have deblob-<kver> with the current deblobbing
machinery for kernel releases older than 2.6.27 is precisely because
it's not just a matter of applying the fixes that are on 2.6.30.
Various of other changes to deblob-2.6.26 are needed to make it work
properly, and the right place to fix them is IMNSHO deblob-2.6.26 and
earlier, not 2.6.31.

Thus, I'm going to merge these changes to the WIP deblob-2.6.26 I have,
and to newer deblob-<kver> files in the SVN repo, although I probably
won't make new releases out of 2.6.[2[789],30} with these changes,
unless we find some major bug in the earlier deblobbing.

Thanks,

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist      Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer