Re: reduce directories in sys/modules ?

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 02:59:06PM -0800, Sam Leffler wrote:
> Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> >Is there a way to reduce the number of directories in sys/modules ?
> >
> >There seems to be one directory per module, even though many of
> >those are related and the source resides in one place
...
> Perhaps you should start by saying why you want to change this?

Because I find it overcomplicated and error prone to force one 
directory per module.  There are many examples of closely related
modules whose source live in a single directory whereas the module
infrastructure consumes a large subtree.

I don't want to put every module in one Makefile, but at least the
related ones sometimes do deserve a merge.
I already mentioned ata with 15 children, iwifw with 3 entries,
netgraph with over 50 children, geom has several too...

The problems that I see are:

+ very easy to forget to update one or more entries when creating
  or modifying the makefiles;

+ redundancy in the content of the Makefiles -- e.g. often times
  related modules share headers and other Makefile variables
  that right now we need to repeat in every Makefile 
  (and given that the hierarchy is not clear, children Makefiles
  cannot inherit from the parent's Makefile)

+ confusion with the names and the hierarchy: sometimes the children
  are at the same level as the parent (e.g. modules/wlan and
  modules/wlan_*), sometimes a child replicates a parent's name
  (modules/ata/ata) sometimes there is a repeated prefix 
  (modules/geom/geom_*) and sometimes there is not (e.g. 
  modules/netgraph/*)

I know that kmod.mk is quite large and touching it is perhaps non trivial,
but if there is at least agreement on what is the direction we might
find someone who wants to work on this.
 
        cheers
        luigi