* Russell King <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.
yes, in the example above i only outlined that the problem is real and
not limited to Aunt Tillie's.
> 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.
circular dependencies are nicely detected, warned about and worked
around by the Kconfig system. I fixed one such bug recently. I have to
say the Kconfig code has improved very significantly during the past few
years and i dont want any of what i'm writing to be understood as a
criticism. It's more in the direction of: 'ok, things are pretty nice
and the config tree works currently, now lets make it even cleaner'.
> 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.
the solution is i think two-fold and goes along the lines i outlined in
the previous mail:
- make dependencies as tree-alike as possible
note that the MTD problem was caused by those drivers not being part of
a clean tree.
But even with a 100% clean tree structure there's a legitimate desire to
select modules several layers down from the current 'leaf' nodes of the
config tree:
- provide a tool mode (not a Kconfig language feature) to navigate the
complete tree of features (including currently disabled ones) and
enable the selection of components (by automatically selecting all
dependent features).
Ingo
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