Re: Ingo, no more kconfig patches

Adrian Bunk
2008-05-04T07:48:19Z

On Sat, May 03, 2008 at 11:54:11PM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
> On Sun, 04 May 2008 01:03:30 +0300, Adrian Bunk said:
> > On Sat, May 03, 2008 at 11:52:14PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> > > My larger point is that this kconfig tool bug breeds a constant stream
> > > of avoidable breakages, which causes lost manpower and causes a stream
> > > of trivial patches hindering maintainers all around the tree. Because
> > > every such trivial patch has to be reviewed, tested, it clogs the commit
> > > logs, etc.
> > >
> > > So the more trivial patches we _avoid_ having to do in the future, the
> > > better. I'm not sure why you are even arguing against this this rather
> > > simple point - your arguments are rather hard to understand. Wouldnt you
> > > be happier if a whole category of trivial breakages was avoided and if
> > > you didnt have to deal with and waste your time on that category of
> > > trivial patches anymore?
> > >
> > > Most of the time reoccuring trivial patches are an indicator of some
> > > deeper structural problem - as in this case.
> >
> > Your conclusions are based on an assumption that isn't true.
> >
> > "trivial patches" are the patches you send.
> >
> > But they are often bogus.
> >
> > Fixing these issues properly often requires a deeper understanding of
> > both kconfig and the dependencies of the underlying code.
>
> I suspect that Ingo is however correct

Ingo claims the problem was trivial since the patches were trivial.

But fact is they aren't trivial - as you can e.g. see on Ingos patch
that started this thread, and that was for the completely wrong place.

> - although a *proper* fix of one of
> these bugs requires human-intelligence to figure out what's *really* intended,
> the kconfig program *does* have enough information available to issue a a clear
> warning:
>
> "Yo doodz - I don't know *what* you intended here, but this SELECT is just
> waiting to sink its teeth into somebody's posterior. You might want to fix it
> somehow before somebody needs rabies shots..."
>...

And what do you want to do in such a case?

Kconfig is a user interface, and we actually need such cases you want to
warn for for getting a good UI.

We already know what can cause problems.

But as far as I know there are no such problems users actually ran into
in recent stable kernels - and most of the problems (like the one in
this thread) are pathological cornercases you only see with randconfig.

cu
Adrian

--

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"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
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