Re: A Kernel Configuration Tale of Woe

[John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com>]

> > For boards its not that simple. Many vendors release multiple >
> > utterly different machines with the same box, bios and ident.
> > The customer is told "IDE CD, 100mbit ethernet", the customer
> > gets random cheapest going ethernet.
> 
> Agreed - so then the association between "board" and "chipset" must
> be capable of being multi-valued, and when there is a mult-valued
> match there must be some means of further interrogating the user (or
> user agent) for more information.

This demonstrates a very important point - _any_ automatic
configuration program is likely to cause more traffic to this mailing
list, and create more work for users and developers that the current
automatic configuration process:

echo 'My box doesn't boot' | mail linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org

The kernel knows nothing about motherboards, cards, etc.  It knows
about chipsets, and nothing else.  By definition, you cannot have a
kernel configurator that works at a higher level than that.

Why don't we introduce a make allworkingmodules config, which compiles
everything as modules, except for the things that are broken as
modules, (for example IDE in the current 2.5.x tree would be compiled
in).

John.