Re: [kbuild-devel] Why recovering from broken configs is too hard

[Wayne.Brown@altec.com]

Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

>Its worked well enough for the past five years. On odd occasions you do find
>you've inadventantly unconfigured something but normally the conflict vanishes
>with almost no ripples.

>I'm quite happy for oldconfig to continue to do what it did before. I'm quite
>happy to accept its mathematically imperfect, because it hasnt gone far wrong
>yet

Here's a real-life example of how well it works.  I tend to bounce back and
forth between Linus' -pre patches and your -ac patches.  For instance, when
2.4.4-ac4 came out, I was running 2.4.5-pre1.  Here's what I did:

zcat patch-2.4.5-pre1.gz | patch -p1 -s -E -R
zcat patch-2.4.4-ac4.gz | patch -p1 -s -E
mv .config ..
make mrproper
mv ../.config .
make oldconfig
make dep && make bzlilo modules modules_install

I apply nearly every patch set that comes along from you or Linus, and this is
the way I usually do it.  Every once in a while, I run through all the options
in menuconfig just to make certain nothing has gotten hosed up.  Only once can I
remember needing to change an option that had been set incorrectly by oldconfig.

Wayne