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: - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
