On Sat Sep 08 2007 at 19:20:21 +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> >   - It will be much, much, more difficult for the user to wire down a
> >     configuration.  IMO, doing this implies that we (the project) rather
> >     strongly discourage home-grown kernel configurations.
> 
> I disagree on this. If you go by the original list, e.g. for a server
> you would comment out the include for cardbus and PCMCIA. You inline the
> USB and PCI fragments you are interested in. That is not that much more
> work than hunting down the rather long list we currently have.

I suggest a tool for flattening the config file, usage e.g.
config -f GENERIC > MYCONF

That way you could also comment out the inclusion of, say, cardbus from
the config file before flattening it and get a much more trimmed-down
version without extra goop and a "no cardbus" statement.  This might be
at least slightly better for usabilty?

Dunno how much work that is, but I assume negligible for someone who
knows config(1).  Hmm, who around here knows config(1) .... ?-)

> > The last point is important to me:  if we do this, we might as well
> > change the syntax for something much more flexible (like, say, a markup
> > language rumoured to be extensible, or a subset of it, for which we have
> > a parser).

IMHO we should discourage home-grown kernel configs, but OTOH we can't
exactly do that today, tomorrow, or even next week and still have
everything work.  However, would be nice if the project set a policy
for moving towards this (or moving away from it, if so decided).

-- 
Antti Kantee <pooka@iki.fi>                     Of course he runs NetBSD
http://www.iki.fi/pooka/                          http://www.NetBSD.org/
    "la qualité la plus indispensable du cuisinier est l'exactitude"