Re: [RFC/PATCH] improve interaction with ccache

["Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>]

Keith Owens writes:
> Kai Germaschewski <kai-germaschewski@uiowa.edu> wrote:

>> As various people pointed out, ccache is a great win for people compiling 
>> a lot of kernels. (For info on ccache, see ccache.samba.org)
...
> You are fixing the symptom, not the cause.  The symptom is too many
> compiles, people are using ccache to attempt to fix the symptom.  The
> cause is a kernel build system that forces people to make clean or
> mrproper between builds instead of reusing existing objects.
>
> Fix the cause, not the symptom.

Cause: gcc is slow
Symptom: builds are slow
Fix: make gcc fast

That fix won't happen, so we cache the results.
We have two ways to do this:

a. use "make", relying solely on timestamps
b. use "ccache", which uses an md5 checksum AFAIK

With ccache, one could even get rid of make.
It's redundant; just use a shell script. :-)