Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751591AbXBEQMr (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Feb 2007 11:12:47 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751602AbXBEQMr (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Feb 2007 11:12:47 -0500 Received: from caramon.arm.linux.org.uk ([217.147.92.249]:4550 "EHLO caramon.arm.linux.org.uk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751567AbXBEQMq (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Feb 2007 11:12:46 -0500 Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 16:12:27 +0000 From: Russell King To: Ingo Molnar Cc: David Woodhouse , Linus Torvalds , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: [patch] MTD: fix DOC2000/2001/2001PLUS build error Message-ID: <20070205161227.GB4563@flint.arm.linux.org.uk> Mail-Followup-To: Ingo Molnar , David Woodhouse , Linus Torvalds , Linux Kernel Mailing List References: <20070205084523.GA21858@elte.hu> <1170682488.29759.795.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <20070205155627.GA8354@elte.hu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20070205155627.GA8354@elte.hu> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1924 Lines: 43 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 majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/