Re: 2.6.17-rc5-mm1

["Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@google.com>]

Roman Zippel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> 
> 
>>That doesn't seem to cover what we talked about clearly at all ?
>>I suppose the _ALL stuff is meant to cover stuff with overhead,
>>but frankly, what Ingo did seemed much clearer to me.
> 
> 
> It just didn't make much sense, a config option only to configure the 
> default value of unseen values?
> If we have too many debug options, I don't mind to hide them behind an 
> advanced config option, but their default values should not differ between 
> their visible and hidden state, so that the user sees the real values when 
> he enables the advanced option.
> A config option which only configures the default values is much less 
> useful, in an already configured kernel it's completely useless to an user 
> who only wants to enable some runtime checks and unless he reads the help 
> text _carefully_, he might even think that he just enabled some runtime 
> checks. 

Did you read the discussion that lead up to it? I thought that quite
clearly described why such a thing was needed.

Config options need to clearly distinguish what they're for, or people
will screw them up ... given:

config DEBUG_RUNTIME_CHECKS
	bool "Enable runtime debug checks"

config DEBUG_RUNTIME_CHECKS_ALL
	bool "Enable all runtime debug checks"
	depends on DEBUG_RUNTIME_CHECKS

... how is either the user meant to know under which of these to find
things, or the coder introducing a new feature supposed to know where
to put stuff? They're not very descriptive.

Please can we have a more constructive discussion that "it's wrong,
nack" ?

M.