Re: State of the new config & build system

Linus Torvalds
2001-12-28T22:09:32Z

On Fri, 28 Dec 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > So if somebody really wants to help this, make scripts that generate
> > config files AND Configure.help files from a distributed set. And once you
> > do that, you could even imagine creating the old-style config files
>
> Something like:
>
> find $TOPDIR -name "*.cf" -exec cat {} \; > Configure.help

For old tools..

> or changing the tools to look for
>
> Documentation/Configure/CONFIG_SMALL_BANANA

"small banana"? Freud would go wild.

But no. I don't want it under the Documentation directory: I'd much rather
have them _together_ with the config file.

So the config file format could be something that includes the docs, and
you could do something like

find . -name '*.cf' -exec grep '^+' {} \; > Configure.help

for old tools, and nw tools would just automatically get the docs from the
same place they get the config info.

And there would _never_ be more than a few entries per config file: you
can imagine having a separate config file for PCI 100Mbps ethernet drivers
and one for ISA drivers.

The current Configure.help is 25k _lines_, and over a megabyte in size. I
would never consider that good taste in programming, why should I consider
it good in documentation?

Linus