Re: State of the new config & build system

Linus Torvalds
2001-12-28T18:05:01Z

[ Btw, Jeff, any reason why you changed your name to "Legacy Fishtank"? It
took a few mails before I noticed that it also said "garzik" in the
fine print;]

One thing that this big flame-war has brought up is that different people
like different things. There may be a simpler solution to this: have the
core dependency files generated from some other file format.

My pet peeve is "centralized knowledge". I absolutely detested the first
versions of cml2 for having a single config file, and quite frankly I
don't think Eric has even _yet_ separated things out enough - why does the
main "rules.cml" file have architecture-specific info, for example?

That's a big step backwards as far as I'm concerned - we didn't use to
have those stupid global files, and each architecture could do it's own
config rules. Eric never got the point that to me, modularity is _the_
most important thing for maintenance.

Something I also asked for the config system at least a year ago was to
have Configure.help split up. Never happened. It's still one large ugly
file. Driver or architecture maintainers still can't just change _their_
small fragment, they have to touch a global file that they don't "own".

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
(without the automatic checking and losing some information) from the
information.

Linus