Deprecate MAKE and/or CLEAN, introduce BUILD_FLAGS

[evelikov]

Looking across various projects using dkms (bbswitch, nvidia driver, openzfs and a bunch of others). The vast majority of them copy/paste the default (in-dkms) make/clean commands:

make -C $kernel_source_dir M=$dkms_tree/$module/$module_version/build
make -C $kernel_source_dir M=$dkms_tree/$module/$module_version/build clean"

That has a few interesting side effects - both kernel_source_dir (aka the linux path) and $dkms_tree are hard-coded in their config.

Glancing at the more complex modules (nvidia, openzfs) - they are glorified wrappers allowing behaviour changes (via funky indirection).

Off the top of my head, to handle these we could introduce a variable which gets added to the make command above. Say BUILD_FLAGS or BUILD_DEFINES (must include only -D...) or alike. As always the dkms.conf file will have the default, which can be altered by users with the existing conf.d override mechanism.

@scaronni @xuzhen any preferences?

@hadogenes considering your experience with openzfs what your take?

[FlorianHeigl]

user here, i think the larger (vendor) modules aren't so relevant. they'll do their own thing primarily, what worries me is all the outdated / tiny stuff. i.e. when you fix/reactivate some forgotten broadcom 10g driver that actually works perfectly fine but noone took care of.
dkms is one of the few really reliable helps in such work.

[scaronni]

CLEAN has been deprecated in version 3.1.8. Along with all the other improvements done to the latest DKMS releases, I think we can leave MAKE as is right now.