From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jean Delvare Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] misc: remove CONFIG_MISC_DEVICES Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2011 16:27:10 +0200 Message-ID: <20110905162710.348c380f@endymion.delvare> References: <20110829102732.03f0f05d.rdunlap@xenotime.net> <201109021643.14275.arnd@arndb.de> <20110905144134.2c80c4b9@endymion.delvare> <201109051619.35553.arnd@arndb.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <201109051619.35553.arnd@arndb.de> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Arnd Bergmann Cc: Luciano Coelho , Randy Dunlap , matti.j.aaltonen@nokia.com, johannes@sipsolutions.net, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, sameo@linux.intel.com, mchehab@infradead.org, linux-media@vger.kernel.org, linux-omap@vger.kernel.org, Tony Lindgren , Grant Likely List-Id: linux-omap@vger.kernel.org On Mon, 5 Sep 2011 16:19:35 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > On Monday 05 September 2011, Jean Delvare wrote: > > As said before, I'm not sure. Yes, it makes it easier to select misc > > device drivers from Kconfig files. But it also makes it impossible to > > deselect all misc device drivers at once. > > > > I think that what we really need is the implementation in the Kconfig > > system of smart selects, i.e. whenever an entry is selected, everything > > it depends on gets selected as well. I don't know how feasible this is, > > but if it can be done then I'd prefer this to your proposal. > > > > Meanwhile, I am not in favor of applying your patch. The benefit is > > relatively small IMHO (misc device drivers are rarely selected) and > > there is one significant drawback. > > Before I made this patch, I started a different one that added about > a dozen 'select MISC_DEVICES' statements sprinkled all over the kernel > in order to silence the Kconfig warnings. Ah, OK. This certainly shifts the scales towards your side. > The problem is that whenever you select that option, the misc directory > suddenly becomes visible when it was disabled before, and things like > 'oldconfig' will start asking about all other misc drivers as well. Another good point. Maybe I'm convinced now. > I think it would simply be more consistent to have it enabled all > the time. Well, even better would be to move the bulk of the misc > drivers to a proper location sorted by their subsystems. A lot of them > should never have been merged in their current state IMHO. As one of the offenders, I won't dare to comment on this ;) > > That being said, I'm not the one to decide, so if you can convince > > someone with more power (aka Andrew Morton)... > > I think I should finally do what has been talked about a few times and > formally become the maintainer of drivers/char and drivers/misc ;-) > > The problem is that I'm not actually a good maintainer, but maybe it's > better to just have someone instead of falling back to Andrew or > some random subsystem maintainer to send any patches for drivers/misc. Certainly. And having a maintainer for these (non-)subsystems would certainly help keep their size low, while the current trend is in the other direction. -- Jean Delvare