Re: Petition against kernel configuration options madness...

[Matthias Schniedermeyer <ms@citd.de>]

On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 04:22:48PM -0500, Nicholas Wourms wrote:
> Flavio Stanchina wrote:
> >On Sunday 03 November 2002 21:38, Nicholas Wourms wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Stop whining, 2.5 kernels are development kernels -> not *expected* to
> >>work %100!
> >
> >
> >Correct me if I'm wrong, but we're here to work out the problems. That's 
> >one of the major meanings of "development", in my experience.
> >
> >I was bitten too: I loaded my 2.4.19 configuration and looked through most 
> >options, but I overlooked this keyboard/mouse thing. I think it's not 
> >turned on by default if you load an existing configuration, which is 
> >probably not what we want.
> >
> 
> This is true, but if you are going to make a report, make a 
> report, don't advocate changing something which works for 
> most as it stands.  From the subject, one got the idea that 
> people wanted to do some willy-nilly rearranging of the 
> configure options.  The real issue here is that you really 
> should *not* be copying 2.4 .config's over to a 2.5 tree. 
> That way you'll be forced to go through all the options and 
> get the proper "default" options for your platform enabled 
> automatically.

So here goes the suggestion:

The config gets a version-Tag.

Changes before the second dot in the version print a warning that you
should not copy configs between major-versions. (Maybe it is better to
default to exit with the warning and an option to override the exit.)

Only configs without a version-Tag are tricky. Maybe there is a good(tm)
config-option that can be used to guess if the config is from the
current major-version (=2.5). All other configs are "old(tm)".





Bis denn

-- 
Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as 
bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer
wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor -- complicated, 
cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.