Re: second thoughts about DEPRECATED and OBSOLETE maturity levels

From: Sam Ravnborg
Date: Mon Feb 26 2007 - 09:09:15 EST


On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 05:07:24PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> having championed the cause of adding those two code maturity levels
> to init/Kconfig, i just realized that implementing them as simple
> dependencies has a *really* annoying shortcoming.
>
> in order to display that a kernel config feature is experimental,
> developers have not only made that feature depend on EXPERIMENTAL, but
> they've also had to *explicitly* add the trailer "(EXPERIMENTAL)" to
> the prompt line in the Kconfig file, to make it visually obvious.
>
> obviously, it would be *way* nicer if that trailer were produced on
> the fly for any "EXPERIMENTAL" feature, just as it would be for
> OBSOLETE or DEPRECATED (or any other maturity levels people can dream
> up).

I have envisioned that this tag could be added by Kconfig automatically for
all symbols that are dependent on EXPERIMENTAL.
To do so the new option syntax could be extended.
So we had something like:
config EXPERIMENTAL
bool "Bla bla"
option adddisplay=(EXPERIMENTAL)

This would cause all symbols selected by EXPERIMENTAL to have
the string "(EXPERIMENTAL)" added to the prompt when displayed.

Same could be used for DEPRECATED and OBSOLETE.

I have not looked into the feasability to implement this - other
Kconfig items needs to be fixed first.

Sam
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