From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andrew Morton Subject: Re: [PATCH] kconfig: untangle EXPERT and EMBEDDED Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:36:18 -0800 Message-ID: <20120118133618.48948662.akpm@linux-foundation.org> References: <1326295008-29795-1-git-send-email-drjones@redhat.com> <20120118122830.037f1e29.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20120118210441.GA4728@p183.telecom.by> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from mail.linuxfoundation.org ([140.211.169.12]:54285 "EHLO mail.linuxfoundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751844Ab2ARVgV (ORCPT ); Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:36:21 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20120118210441.GA4728@p183.telecom.by> Sender: linux-arch-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: To: Alexey Dobriyan Cc: Andrew Jones , rientjes@google.com, mingo@elte.hu, david.woodhouse@intel.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, gregkh@suse.de, davem@davemloft.net, axboe@kernel.dk, arnd@arndb.de, holt@sgi.com, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org, linux@arm.linux.org.uk, hskinnemoen@gmail.com, egtvedt@samfundet.no, msalter@redhat.com, a-jacquiot@ti.com, starvik@axis.com, jesper nilsson , dhowells@redhat.com, takata@linux-m32r.org, geert@linux-m68k.org, yasutake koichi , jonas@southpole.se, kyle@mcmartin.ca, deller@gmx.de, jejb@parisc-linux.org, chris@zankel.net, greg@kroah.com, davej@redhat.com, airlied@linux.ie, jkosina@suse.cz, mchehab@infradead.org, johannes@sipsolutions.net, linville@tuxdriver.com On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:04:41 +0300 Alexey Dobriyan wrote: > On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:28:30PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > > And ditto EXPERT. Is there really any benefit in hiding config options > > from developers so they won't burn their fingers? Or is there some > > other reason for EXPERT? > > Absolutely. > > If say CONFIG_TMPFS is disabled, Debian simply won't boot past > init scripts. Or CONFIG_UNIX (I'm almost sure, reasonably > modern distro is unusable anyway). > If you screw up your kernel config, the resulting kernel won't work right. There are countless ways of doing this. You go back to the previous .config and try again. Is there some benefit to handholding people in a few special cases? Well yes, I suppose so. But does that benefit justify all the gunk we've added to Kconfig to implement it? I don't think so.