[Buildroot] [PATCH 0/8] core: allow for custom, local help; rearrange package-specific help (branch yem/help)

[Arnout Vandecappelle <arnout@mind.be>]

  Hi Yann,

  Feedback on the overall series rather than individual patches.

On 03/09/16 23:22, Yann E. MORIN wrote:
> Hello All!
>
> This series is an alternative proposal to support displaying custom,
> local help, most probably from a br2-external tree (or from a lcal.mk,
> but that'd be pretty insane).
>
> The basic idea is to offer the user help entries for local
> customisations, but without mixing them with our own help entries.
 >
> I believe we want to keep them separate, as inter-mixing the two could
> lead users to believe those addtional help entries are "native" in
> buildroot, when they are not.

  This is where I have a different opinion. I don't see a problem with "mixing" 
(it's actually appending) with the normal buildroot help. For the user, it makes 
no difference if it's internal or external. And all the additional documentation 
and special handling is really not worth it for such a corner case, IMHO.

  That said, it's mostly bike-shedding, so I don't care too much either way.


> The same way we expose all of br2-external config options under a
> sub-menu labelled "User-provided options",

  Well, I think that's more a technical accident than a deliberate decision. 
It's just not possible to insert external stuff into package/Config.in.

> we do similarly for the
> custom help, albeit with a slight shorter moniker, 'help-local'.

  What I _do_ strongly oppose is the 'local' bit. external or something is 
better IMHO.


> After the first patch implements this (which is really all that is
> needed to print custom help), we go further with providing a macro that
> pretty-prints the help for rules, so that the layout is all handled in a
> single location. This macro can also be used by the local help, too.

  This bit I really like!


  Regards,
  Arnout

> This macro is then used to implement per-package specific help (which is
> currently only about kconfig-related changes, but can not easily be done
> in the kconfig-package infra) into the packages themseves, to clean up
> the main help code (the entris are still displayed there, they are just
> definedin each concerned package).
>
> All that, plus a bit of associated documentation, of course. ;-)
>
> Thanks to J?r?me for his initial proposal, and Arnout for
> before-inception suggestions:
>      http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-March/155415.html
>
> Regards,
> Yann E. MORIN.
>
>
> The following changes since commit 07f46c2b6daec44a6176039c90be67e66c4c2e42:
>
>    package/busybox: support automatic module loading with mdev (2016-03-09 23:07:44 +0100)
>
> are available in the git repository at:
>
>    git://git.busybox.net/~ymorin/git/buildroot yem/help
>
> for you to fetch changes up to b94d50a5f7717ad1ea2d9cab129155a0ab203f71:
>
>    docs/manual: document the br2-external help-local (2016-03-09 23:10:37 +0100)
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Yann E. MORIN (8):
>        core: add the possibility to provide help for local, custom rules
>        core/pkg-utils: add a macro to pretty-print a help entry
>        core/pkg-generic: add help about package-specific rules
>        package/busybox: use the generic help rules
>        linux: add the generic help rules
>        package/uclibc: use the generic help rules
>        boot/barebox: use the generic help rules
>        docs/manual: document the br2-external help-local
>
>   Makefile                                | 23 +++++++----------------
>   boot/barebox/barebox.mk                 |  4 ++++
>   docs/manual/adding-packages-generic.txt |  6 ++++++
>   docs/manual/customize-outside-br.txt    | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
>   linux/linux.mk                          |  6 ++++++
>   package/busybox/busybox.mk              |  2 ++
>   package/pkg-generic.mk                  |  2 ++
>   package/pkg-utils.mk                    | 13 +++++++++++++
>   package/uclibc/uclibc.mk                |  2 ++
>   9 files changed, 62 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)
>


-- 
Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
Senior Embedded Software Architect            +32-16-286500
Essensium/Mind                                http://www.mind.be
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