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

From: David Woodhouse
Date: Tue Feb 06 2007 - 18:12:43 EST


On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 14:53 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I don't think you've ever showed any such example.
>
> And if you did, it would all boil down to *exactly* what 'select' does:
> config options that get set automatically based on other choices.

That's one option which I don't think I've seen implemented.

The other possibility which comes to mind, and which I _have_ seen
implemented, is not to hide the disabled option but to _show_ it, and
represent its dependencies right there next to it somehow.

Where I saw this done was actually in the Nemesis kernel configuration,
which was based on our old tcl xconfig tool. It actually worked quite
well. It's a _long_ time ago now, but IIRC it was in a cell below the
disabled option. It'd look something like (remember hte old xconfig?):

------------------------------------------------------------------------
| USB Mass storage support | o Y o M â N |
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| depends on: o SCSI â USB |
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sure I had a screenshot of it once. But it doesn't matter; you get
the idea -- our current tools would do it differently anyway. But they
_could_ do it.

> So care to give a real example? Start with USB automatically selecting
> SCSI support without the user having to even know it uses SCSI. Tell me
> how it's supposed to work sanely without 'select'.

Well one option, as you suggest, is just that if you go into the
graphical tool and enable USB_STORAGE, you get SCSI turned on
automatically. That's simple enough and the xconfig tool can do it quite
easily. It just needs to _show_ you the option, which isn't particularly
hard. But what I care about is that when you when you explicitly set
# CONFIG_SCSI is not set
and run 'make oldconfig' it doesn't get turned back on again.

But as I said, I'm not entirely averse to having to do 'make
oldconfig-noselect' or something like that to preserve the old
behaviour. And then you can sprinkle 'select' wherever you like without
bothering those of us who object.

--
dwmw2

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