Re: [PATCH v3 1/2] drm/tinydrm: Move tinydrm_of_find_backlight into drm_of.c

[Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@linux.intel.com>]

On Mon, 02 Oct 2017, Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch> wrote:
> Also adding Jani, who looked at the backlight Kconfig mess in the past.

I've even sent patches to fix some of the dependency mess, but the
problem is social not technical. The problem is that people think
"select" is more convenient than "depends" because they can just enable
a config that way, while "depends" would require finding and enabling
all the dependencies before the menu option even shows up.

I don't deny, that's annoying. But it's also abuse of select, see
Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-language.txt:

  Note:
	select should be used with care. select will force
	a symbol to a value without visiting the dependencies.
	By abusing select you are able to select a symbol FOO even
	if FOO depends on BAR that is not set.
	In general use select only for non-visible symbols
	(no prompts anywhere) and for symbols with no dependencies.
	That will limit the usefulness but on the other hand avoid
	the illegal configurations all over.

The real fix would be making finding and enabling dependencies
recursively more convenient, but I don't see that happening anytime
soon.

BR,
Jani.


-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Technology Center