Re: [PATCH] kconfig: untangle EXPERT and EMBEDDED

[Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>]

On Wednesday 11 January 2012, David Rientjes wrote:
> We discussed this when the patch was made to change EMBEDDED to EXPERT and 
> we knew that things like CONFIG_SLOB exist that would only make sense on a 
> platform with a very small memory footprint.  So what criteria are you 
> using to determine what makes sense for EMBEDDED or not and what would be 
> generally useful for platforms with very small memory footprints?
> 
> I would think that something like CONFIG_SMALLMEM would identify those 
> candidates (for things like SLOB) and then you could separate the rest 
> based on the platform they exist for since you're essentially introducing 
> a new config symbol here that existed in the past but are now using it 
> with different semantics.

The CONFIG_SMALLMEM would also require people to know what they are doing,
beyond what we expect the average person building a kernel to, which is
just what CONFIG_EXPERT means, and the same reason why we ended up renaming
CONFIG_EMBEDDED to CONFIG_EXPERT. People have a very different understanding
of what "embedded" actually means, and not all of those require small
memory footprint or even a custom kernel. Let's just stay with CONFIG_EXPERT.

	Arnd