linux-kernel - Re: [patch] MTD: fix DOC2000/2001/2001PLUS build error

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Date:	Mon, 5 Feb 2007 16:12:27 +0000
From:	Russell King <rmk+lkml@....linux.org.uk>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [patch] MTD: fix DOC2000/2001/2001PLUS build error

On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 04:56:27PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> btw., this whole select problem is not limited to Aunt Tillie: in a 
> couple of cases in the past few months when i saw some weird code in a 
> driver and tried to enable it i had to search around for many minutes 
> and enable random options to figure out its config dependencies until i 
> had the driver truly enabled. (if there's some easy solution to this 
> then i'm all ears - but i exclude the easiest solution of adding me to 
> the 'aunt' category ;-) I think that by blaming Aunt Tillie you might be 
> missing the real problem.

Adding a 'select' statement might solve that particular problem:

 "What config symbols do I need to turn on to enable FOO"

but it creates another problem which is at precisely the same level.
IOW:

 "What config symbols do I need to turn off to disable FOO"

Both require the use of grep to solve it.  Both are as bad as each
other.  'select' only moves the problem - it doesn't actually solve
anything.

The real problem is that "band-aiding" the problem is all too easy,
so we just bung a select in.  We're actually storing up bigger problems
for the future, making the kernel configuration system more and more
complex, sometimes creating circular dependencies through select/depends,
basically turning it into something several orders of magnitude worse
than the original shell scripts.

The only real way I see the problem truely getting solved is if folk
start standing up against throwing "select" in so there's some
motivation to actually fix the underlying problem.

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:
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