Re: [patch] MTD: fix DOC2000/2001/2001PLUS build error

Matt Mackall wrote:
On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 08:09:58PM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 11:21:34PM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
But Alan makes a reasonable suggestion -- we could work around this in
the tools too.
I wouldn't call it "work around this" in the tools. It's a useful
feature we can add in the tools for developers who aren't men enough
to use "sed/grep" pipelines. :-)

But I have to agree with Linus here that we should be optimizing the
tools for people who know how to compile the kernel, but who aren't
necessarily familiar with all of the hidden dependencies in the
literally hundreds of config options in the kernel tree. In reality,
you want to make it easy to turn on *or* off any arbitrary config
option, and to understand what you need to do so you can turn an
arbitrary config option on or off. If that means tools enhancements,
so be it.

With apt (or presumably with yum), you can happily apt-remove
a package that nothing else depends on. If you remove something that
other things depend on, you get a list of those things and opportunity
to force it (with a -f flag, for instance). If you ask for a package
that has other dependencies, it automatically pulls all those things
in unless there's a conflict. In which case you can force it again.

There's no reason we shouldn't be able to do exactly that with config
symbols in Kconfig-land. The only difference is that we've got
slightly different semantics for our "depend" keyword. Things which
don't have their "depend" requirements met aren't offered as options.
Whereas "select" is "automatically pull in dependencies"
apt/yum-style.

Perhaps this is because there is a lacking keyword. The depends controls visibility, perhaps a "requires" could be used to provide advisory information which mean "these other things will be turned on if you build this feature."

While we're at it, it would also be nice to be able to do:

$ kconfig enable ACPI
CONFIG_ACPI conflicts with CONFIG_APM
$ kconfig enable -F ACPI
disabling CONFIG_APM
$ kconfig disable SCSI
CONFIG_USB_STORAGE depends on CONFIG_SCSI
$ kconfig disable -f SCSI
disabling USB_STORAGE
$ make

I think depends and select provide this now, the postulated "requires" might make building the trees easier.

--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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