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Subject: Re: RFC: collection of common distro configs?
To:     Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc:     LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
References: <a7fac800-02ae-62d4-00d4-770facff4a7c@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
 <YIqW5a2DTsw7uc9O@kroah.com>
From:   Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Message-ID: <69c626ba-4c50-9414-6ed4-51eaf04457df@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Date:   Thu, 29 Apr 2021 13:54:17 +0200
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On 29/04/2021 13.22, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 12:26:54PM +0200, Rasmus Villemoes wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> Does anybody know of a place where one can find a collection of .configs
>> from various distros? I think it might be useful to be able to grep
>> around to see what features are actually enabled by which distros.
>>
>> Based on the domain name, I hoped linuxconfig.org would be such a place,
>> if so I cannot find it.
>>
>> If no such collection exists, do others agree it might be useful? If so,
>> I'll be happy to throw up a repo somewhere and start collecting them.
> 
> It will change on a monthly basis, is this really all that useful?  Who
> will keep it up to date?
> 
> What are you trying to determine?

Concretely, I wanted to know if any distro has CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH
set to something other than the empty string (if they have
CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER at all). There are some in-tree _defconfigs with
that, but that doesn't say a whole lot, nobody knows if anybody use
those defconfigs.

But it's something I've wanted to use on other occasions before, and I
see from Arnd's reply that I'm not alone.

It's not about which distros enable some random rtc driver - it's for
the more generic, high-level config options it would be useful. Stack
protector and other hardening things. Is tracing enabled? How about
dynamic_debug, anybody (not) using that? Or legacy config options, can
we remove CONFIG_USELIB and be done with it?

For the same reason, I wouldn't need a new copy of /boot/config-`uname
-r` every time a distro updates to the next -stable tag, the configs are
very likely to be the same for all practical purposes.

As for maintaining it: I'm not going to actively hunt down .configs from
various distros - if that was easy, I wouldn't have asked here in the
first place. I was hoping for crowd-sourcing it; create a github repo
with a README laying out the directory structure and hope kernel devs
would send me the .config they have on their machine in the form of a PR
(or just an email with the info I'd need). It's very likely I'm naive.
But at least I'm not alone in wishing such a thing existed.

Rasmus