Re: Will 2.6 require Python for any configuration ? (CML2)

[Jes Sorensen <jes@sunsite.dk>]

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Rini <trini@kernel.crashing.org> writes:

Tom> On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 10:36:20AM -0500, Bob Glamm wrote:
Tom> And the same set of replies.  Doing it in !python would be much
Tom> harder than it sounds.  But people have stepped up and said
Tom> they'd do it in C.  So python is only needed for xconfig.  And
Tom> that's just trading tcl for python.  The other thing is, the
Tom> python cml2 tools are supposed to eliminate a bunch of other
Tom> tools and remove some of the dependancies.

Most of these tools were written in bash or C ... going the python way
is a major loss.

>> Why isn't ncurses a pain?  For the same reason ncurses wasn't a
>> pain when 'make menuconfig' (lxdialog) was introduced (yes, I did
>> many a 'make config'): curses/ncurses was already on just about
>> every system running Linux - it was built into the text editor.

Tom> And many a new system has python.

It still doesn't solve the situation of people building embedded
systems who do only have a bare minimum on their systems. Or people
who are bringing up systems who do not have network/floppy available
and do not want to move their disks between systems constantly in
order to configure their kernels. I have brought this point up
several times to the CML2 developer and every time I received the
utterly useless answer saying I should move my source to another box,
configure it there and move it back to the devel box.

>> It does surprise me that Linus would actually allow this to happen.
>> It's been my impression that he favors a clean, elegant solution.
>> Maybe it's just me, but adding a dependency solely for the sake of
>> building the kernel doesn't strike me as very clean or elegant.

Tom> Because the python solution happened to fix all of the problems.

And introduces new problems that so far haven't been addressed.

The solution seems to be that someone implements CML2 in C, once that
happens we are talking something completely different.

Jes