I suppose a polite title for me would be "maintainer emiritus"
of make config, make menuconfig, and make xconfig.
I'm in favor of abandoning the current tools because:
It's 3x maintenance to have 3 parsers for the same language.
It's difficult to do good syntax checking in scripts/Configure and
menuconfig.
menuconfig in particular is too ugly to live.
A company which considers Linux its #1 enemy may own the copyright to
"scripts/Configure". I don't know what kind of marketing or legal
play they could make, but it would surely be hostile to Linux.
I'm in favor of CML2 in particular because:
ESR has designed a clean theory, which the configuration process really
needs after ten years of ad hoc extensions.
ESR has done a lot of grunt work to turn a particular idea into a
viable implementation. It's hard to get that work done.
As far as the Python issue goes, I believe that the kernel documentation
just needs to state clearly what tools (and what versions) are needed
to build a kernel. If other people prefer a C implementation, then
CML2 (the language) is amenable to a C implementation, so they can
write one.
As far as CML2 versus an mconfig-based solution, I am tilted towards CML2,
as it is simply a better language. I would be happy with either choice
if Linus made one of those choices. I would be unhappy if 2.6/3.0
continued to ship with Configure/menuconfig/xconfig.
Michael Elizabeth Chastain
<mailto:[email protected]>
"love without fear"
On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 11:18:38AM -0600, Michael Elizabeth Chastain wrote:
> As far as CML2 versus an mconfig-based solution, I am tilted towards CML2,
> as it is simply a better language. I would be happy with either choice
> if Linus made one of those choices. I would be unhappy if 2.6/3.0
> continued to ship with Configure/menuconfig/xconfig.
Indepenand of wether 2.6 will use CML1 or CML2 I hope it won't ship with
the actual config tool. It's so much nicer to have mconfig compiled once
in /usr/bin instead of compiling menuconfig all the time in the tree.
No to mention it's much easier to propagate bug fixes this way..
Christoph
--
Of course it doesn't work. We've performed a software upgrade.
On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 06:30:45PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 11:18:38AM -0600, Michael Elizabeth Chastain wrote:
> > As far as CML2 versus an mconfig-based solution, I am tilted towards CML2,
> > as it is simply a better language. I would be happy with either choice
> > if Linus made one of those choices. I would be unhappy if 2.6/3.0
> > continued to ship with Configure/menuconfig/xconfig.
>
> Indepenand of wether 2.6 will use CML1 or CML2 I hope it won't ship with
> the actual config tool. It's so much nicer to have mconfig compiled once
> in /usr/bin instead of compiling menuconfig all the time in the tree.
>
> No to mention it's much easier to propagate bug fixes this way..
>
If the configure system is outside of the kernel, you have the possibility
of requiring newer user-space utilities as a stable kernel changes over
time...