From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Sun, 20 May 2001 17:00:23 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Sun, 20 May 2001 17:00:13 -0400 Received: from nat-pool-meridian.redhat.com ([199.183.24.200]:36106 "EHLO devserv.devel.redhat.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Sun, 20 May 2001 16:59:56 -0400 Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 16:59:52 -0400 From: Arjan van de Ven To: "Eric S. Raymond" , David Woodhouse , Arjan van de Ven , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Background to the argument about CML2 design philosophy Message-ID: <20010520165952.A9622@devserv.devel.redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <20010518113726.A29617@devserv.devel.redhat.com> <20010518114922.C14309@thyrsus.com> <8485.990357599@redhat.com> <20010520111856.C3431@thyrsus.com> <15823.990372866@redhat.com> <20010520114411.A3600@thyrsus.com> <16267.990374170@redhat.com> <20010520131457.A3769@thyrsus.com> <18686.990380851@redhat.com> <20010520164700.H4488@thyrsus.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010520164700.H4488@thyrsus.com>; from esr@thyrsus.com on Sun, May 20, 2001 at 04:47:00PM -0400 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 04:47:00PM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > In order to prevent that happening, I would like to have some recognized > criterion for configuration cases that are so perverse that it is a > net loss to accept the additional complexity of handling them within the > configurator. "It doesn't compile/link" would be a good one. "It requires subsystem FOO to operate" is another (think about IDE DMA drivers and the IDE subsystem, or NIC drivers vs CONFIG_NET) > A lot of people (including, apparently, you) are saying there are no such > cases. I wonder if you'll change your minds when you have to handle the > overhead yourselves? Somehow the current overhead isn't that high. You might argue that the current Config.in is broken given my definition. That is fixable with a day of work; I've been doing so on a regular basis with the tooling I wrote for automatic testing of this. Maybe it would be possible to separate "hard" dependencies like the current system has with the "soft" ones one needs for entry-level configtools. Or maybe it needs 2 files for that.. CML1 style (style, maybe not syntax) ones and the newstyle info. I liked the suggestion where the "automatic" derivations got turned into manual ones for expert mode... I haven't tried CML2 yet (I've yet to find a suitable .deb of Python2 for my Debian Potato playbox) so I don't know if that is actually possible, or that it requires some redesign. Greetings, Arjan van de Ven