On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 04:56:27PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> btw., this whole select problem is not limited to Aunt Tillie: in a
> couple of cases in the past few months when i saw some weird code in a
> driver and tried to enable it i had to search around for many minutes
> and enable random options to figure out its config dependencies until i
> had the driver truly enabled. (if there's some easy solution to this
> then i'm all ears - but i exclude the easiest solution of adding me to
> the 'aunt' category ;-) I think that by blaming Aunt Tillie you might be
> missing the real problem.
Adding a 'select' statement might solve that particular problem:
"What config symbols do I need to turn on to enable FOO"
but it creates another problem which is at precisely the same level.
IOW:
"What config symbols do I need to turn off to disable FOO"
Both require the use of grep to solve it. Both are as bad as each
other. 'select' only moves the problem - it doesn't actually solve
anything.
The real problem is that "band-aiding" the problem is all too easy,
so we just bung a select in. We're actually storing up bigger problems
for the future, making the kernel configuration system more and more
complex, sometimes creating circular dependencies through select/depends,
basically turning it into something several orders of magnitude worse
than the original shell scripts.
The only real way I see the problem truely getting solved is if folk
start standing up against throwing "select" in so there's some
motivation to actually fix the underlying problem.
--
Russell King
Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
maintainer of:
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