Re: [patch] config language dep_* enhancements

[Greg Banks <gnb@alphalink.com.au>]

Peter Samuelson wrote:
> 
> [Kai Germaschewski]
>
> sed '/dep_/s/ \$CONFIG_/ CONFIG_/g' is quite effective.  In any case
> it is not hard to support both syntaxes - once the transition is
> complete, 

Does "complete" mean all the ports have also made the change and been merged back?

or reasonably complete, we can change the semantics to
> 'n'=='', which in Configure/Menuconfig can only be enforced in the
> non-$ case (well, unless we use your 'source' statement idea).

I don't think it's good policy to have the $ and non-$ cases behaving
differently if we can avoid it.

> >   I find a) more intuitive, for people who know sh, it's pretty
> >   clear when we use "$" and when not. Also, for 'if' statements,
> >   we'll have to use the "$" variant anyway for all I can see, so I
> >   prefer that from a consistency point of view.
> 
> The problem with "intuitive for people who know sh" is that people
> think Config.in *is* shell.  They start putting in constructs which
> are not valid Config.in syntax but which *are* valid sh syntax, so
> they work with certain parsers but not others.

Tell me about it ;-) Actually the incidence of this is low, presumably
someone comes along and reports an xconfig failure and the problem gets
fixed.  I found only a half-dozen or so of these.

I'm more concerned about subtle dependencies on execution order resulting
from misuse of conditionals.

Greg.
-- 
the price of civilisation today is a courageous willingness to prevail,
with force, if necessary, against whatever vicious and uncomprehending
enemies try to strike it down.     - Roger Sandall, The Age, 28Sep2001.