Subject: Re: Refactoring MI devices in GENERIC and friends
To: Antti Kantee <pooka@cs.hut.fi>
From: Michael Lorenz <macallan@netbsd.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 09/08/2007 14:01:27
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Hello,

On Sep 8, 2007, at 13:46, Antti Kantee wrote:

> 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?

Hmm, that would be a little more complex I think - you probably don't 
want to expand files.pci for instance. Maybe include statements need a 
flag that says 'ignore me when exporting' ?

> 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).

We can't really do that without much better LKM support, as in most 
drivers being available as modules which can be loaded and unloaded on 
demand.

have fun
Michael
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