Re: [PATCH] Improved usability of the Makefile in libbpf

From: Xin Liu
Date: Thu Dec 01 2022 - 21:13:28 EST


On Wed, 30 Nov 2022 at 00:42:09 AM Andrii Nakryiko <andrii.nakryiko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 11:42 PM Xin Liu <liuxin350@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Current libbpf Makefile does not contain the help command, which
> > is inconvenient to use. A help command is provided to list the
> > commands supported by libbpf make and the functions of the commands.
> ...
> > + @echo ' make prefix=/path [install targets] use prefix for installing'
> > + @echo ' into a user defined prefix path'
>
>
> I'm a bit hesitant about adding all this. Most of those targets are
> not intended to be used directly, only "all", "clean", and "install"
> are supposed to be used by end-users (maybe also "install_headers").
> And those seems to be pretty typical and straightforward targets.
>
> I actually didn't even know about `make help`, but I checked perf's
> `make help` and it's way more succinct, let's try modeling it here?
>
> Also, please use [PATCH bpf-next] (with v2 in between them) for next
> submission to point that this is meant for bpf-next tree.

Thanks to andrii's reply, I'll try to simplify the help command.

The original purpose of adding this is that when I use libbpf, libbpf installs
the file in /usr/local by default, and I didn't read the makefile carefully
before, so I need to open the makefile to read the code. Determine which
parameter is used to define the path that I want to customize. The makefile
of the kernel provides a make help instruction, which is much more convenient
to use.