Re: [PATCH 0/4] media Kconfig reorg - part 2

From: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>
To: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>
Cc: "Helen Koike" <helen.koike@collabora.com>,
	"Linux Media Mailing List" <linux-media@vger.kernel.org>,
	"Alexandre Belloni" <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com>,
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	"Michal Simek" <michal.simek@xilinx.com>,
	"Lad, Prabhakar" <prabhakar.csengg@gmail.com>,
	"Laurent Pinchart" <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>,
	"Pavel Machek" <pavel@ucw.cz>,
	devel@driverdev.osuosl.org, linux-renesas-soc@vger.kernel.org,
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	"Ludovic Desroches" <ludovic.desroches@microchip.com>,
	"Krzysztof Kozlowski" <krzk@kernel.org>,
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	linux-kbuild@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] media Kconfig reorg - part 2
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2020 11:27:47 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200402112747.57dd1cfe@coco.lan> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200401105949.GB2001@kadam>

Em Wed, 1 Apr 2020 13:59:49 +0300
Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com> escreveu:

> On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 04:36:31PM -0300, Helen Koike wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > On 3/25/20 1:03 PM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:  
> > > That's the second part of media Kconfig changes. The entire series is
> > > at:
> > > 
> > > 	https://git.linuxtv.org/mchehab/experimental.git/log/?h=media-kconfig  
> > 
> > I made a quick experiment (using this branch) with someone who works
> > with the kernel for his master degree, but doesn't have much experience in kernel development in general.
> > I asked him to enable Vimc (from default configs, where multimedia starts disabled).  
> 
> The whole config system is really outdated.

Agreed. 

Btw, when compiled against Qt 5.14, "make xconfig" is currently
broken. I'm sending in a few some fixup patches for it.

> It should be that this task was done with a command like "kconfig enable
> vimc".  It would ask necessary questions and pull in the dependencies
> automatically.

Yes. That's something that it is missing for a long time. There were
some efforts to add a SAT solver at the Kernel that could be used for
that, but I dunno what's current status.

> Twenty years ago it made sense to go through the menus and select things
> one by one.  Does anyone really start from defconfig any more?  Surely
> everyone starts with a known working config and just enables specific
> options.

Yeah, that's my feeling too.

> I started to hack together some code to create a kconfig program to
> enable and disable options.  The problem is that all library code
> assumes we want to display menus so it was a lot of work and I gave up.

:-(

Thanks,
Mauro