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Date:   Tue, 6 Dec 2022 21:10:10 -0800
From:   Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
To:     Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc:     Nick Alcock <nick.alcock@oracle.com>,
        Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>,
        linux-modules@vger.kernel.org, linux-trace-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        eugene.loh@oracle.com, kris.van.hees@oracle.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v10 05/13] kbuild: remove
 MODULE_LICENSE/AUTHOR/DESCRIPTION in non-modules
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On Tue, Dec 06, 2022 at 09:03:52PM -0800, Luis Chamberlain wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 06, 2022 at 10:02:30PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 6, 2022, at 21:03, Nick Alcock wrote:
> > > On 6 Dec 2022, Geert Uytterhoeven uttered the following:
> > > Only MODULE_LICENSE invokes MODULE_FILE and thus ends up introducing a
> > > KBUILD_MODOBJS entry that triggers things going wrong iff not a module:
> > > so only it needs to go out (or be replaced with a variant that doesn't
> > > invoke MODULE_FILE, if you want to keep the license in too --
> > 
> > That sounds like a better alternative
> > 
> > > but if the thing is no longer a standalone entity at all I'm not sure
> > > what meaning it could possibly have).
> > 
> > As far as I can tell, the general trend is to make more things modules,
> > so there is a good chance that these come back eventually. If the
> > information in the MODULE_LICENSE field isn't wrong, I would just
> > leave it in there.
> 
> Tooling today uses it though to make a deterministic call on if something
> *can* be a module. In particular after commit 8b41fc4454e ("kbuild: create
> modules.builtin without Makefile.modbuiltin or tristate.conf") we rely on
> the module license tag to generate the modules.builtin file. This in
> turn is used to allow modprobe to *not* fail when trying to load a module
> which is built-in.
> 
> So we can't just disable the tag for when the code is built-in as *want*
> to carry it when modules are built-in, that is the point, to help
> userspace with this determination.
> 
> I don't think we want to revert 8b41fc4454e as it means we'd force Kbuild to
> traverse the source tree twice.
> 
> Geert's point was not keeping MODULE_LICENSE() but instead the other
> MODULE_*() crap for things which are not modules in case in the future
> code becomes a module...
> 
> But I don't see the point in keeping things around just in case, if we
> want to keep things simple. Just use the SPDX license tag for the license.

Or if you really want to keep it just make it an *eye-sore*, and comment it out.

I don't see why at build-time we should suffer.

  Luis