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Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 17:08:40 -0500
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
        Legacy Fishtank <garzik@havoc.gtf.org>, Dave Jones <davej@suse.de>,
        "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>,
        Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo@conectiva.com.br>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, kbuild-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [kbuild-devel] Re: State of the new config & build system
Message-ID: <20011228170840.A20254@thyrsus.com>
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Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>:
> So the config file format could be something that includes the docs, and
> you could do something like
> 
> 	find . -name '*.cf' -exec grep '^+' {} \; > Configure.help
> 
> for old tools, and nw tools would just automatically get the docs from the
> same place they get the config info.

OK.  Background, for anyone who doesn't know this: the equivalent of 
Configure.help in CML2 is the symbols.cml file.  It's actually generated
fat CML2 installation time from Configure.help.

Here's what a sample entry looks like in Configure.help form:

Support the foo feature
CONFIG_FOO
  This is a sample help entry.

Here's the same entry in CML2 format:

FOO	"Support the foo feature" text
This is a sample help entry.
.

Now.  It would be dead easy to split symbols.cml into bunch of little
files and distribute them through the source tree.  It would be just as
easy to write a script to reassemble Configure.help, but there won't be
any reason to do it.  Once CML2 goes in, nothing will use Configure.help

> The current Configure.help is 25k _lines_, and over a megabyte in size. I
> would never consider that good taste in programming, why should I consider
> it good in documentation?

Um...because the cases aren't parallel?

What makes megabyte-large blocks of code bad is that they tend to be
tangled messes with unmaintainable reference and control structures.
Configure.help isn't; the entries are atoms that don't interact with
each other.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
	-- T.S. Eliot
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