On Wed, 24 Jun 1998, Jonathan Stone wrote:

> The only user-visible change is that config will warn when you define
> kernel options which haven't (yet) translated to a defopt -- mostly
> COMPAT_*, networking options, and (on some ports) CPU-level options.
> The warnings are harmless, but it gives a chance to catch mis-spelled
> option names. 

Now that I've had a few days to think and experiment, I've come to the
conclusion that this is probably suboptimal.

There are still a lot of options that aren't defopt'ed... and some of the
should probably never be.  The warnings may be harmless, but a lot of end
users are going to freak out and not even both to try to compile the
kernel.

There's a slightly more insidious problem, as well.  Because there is a
strong incentive to defopt quick hack options due to the warning message,
people will do this and add the required #include "opt_foo.h" to various
files in the kernel source.  If you are sharing a source tree, however,
uninterested parties will suddenly find that they have to re-run config --
and only when they encounter a file that need the opt file.

I'd like to suggest that we make these messages optional, i.e.  only
printed when a -v flag is specified.  If that's acceptable, I'll volunteer
to make the change.

--scott