On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, Gabriel C wrote: > Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > this has *nothing* to do with the aforementioned maturity levels. > > i understand entirely the inconsistency above. what i'm > > suggesting is that it might very well be more appropriate to *drop > > the dependency* rather than munge the prompt to add the qualifier. > > This is a thing the author/maintainer/subsystem maintainer should and need do. > > They know when something is not EXPERIMENTAL anymore. agreed (sort of). all i'm saying (and after this, i'll shut the heck up about it) is that, if you find a Kconfig entry of the form: config FUBAR prompt "whatever" depends on ... && EXPERIMENTAL and you want to make that selection consistent, you have two possibilities: 1) add "(EXPERIMENTAL)" to the prompt to match the dependency, or 2) drop the dependency on EXPERIMENTAL to match the prompt i contend that, *for now*, it's a better investment in time to find entries like that that are *clearly* not experimental any more, and drop the dependency. not only will that make it consistent, but it's unlikely that you'll ever have to *revert* that decision. OTOH, it's quite possible that, after you add the prompt suffix of "(EXPERIMENTAL)" for consistency, the feature maintainer might come by tomorrow and say something like, "nah, that feature's been around for years, it's as stable as it gets," and will undo the patch you just made, wasting your time and effort. lastly, i'm not convinced that it's *only* the feature maintainer that can make that decision. surely, there's enough clever people here who can look at any given feature and say, "yeah, i've been using that for years, it's rock solid, it's stupid to keep that dependent on EXPERIMENTAL." all i'm saying is, if you want to put some time in here, it's better invested in *removing* what are clearly ridiculous dependencies on EXPERIMENTAL, rather than *adding* even more of that labelling to the tree. rday p.s. even if a given Kconfig entry *is* consistent, as in: config SNAFU bool "... (EXPERIMENTAL)" depends on ... && EXPERIMENTAL ... it's clear that there's a pile of *that* stuff for which all references to EXPERIMENTAL can be dropped. all in all, given the possible cleanup here, i'm thinking that going in and *adding* more EXPERIMENTAL clutter to the Kconfig files is going in exactly the wrong direction. -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://fsdev.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page ======================================================================== - 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/