Re: [patch] e1000=y && e1000e=m regression fix

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, 11 Apr 2008, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> 
> Wouldn't it make more sense to turn E1000 into a option that does nothing 
> except select both E1000E and E1000_PCI, and have those two be the options 
> that build drivers?

Yes, that sounds fine too. Although you need to add a

	depends on PCI

to the E1000 thing (because the "select" would not honor the dependencies 
that E1000E and E1000_PCI have).

However:

> Then, after a while, we drop the E1000 option entirely

I agree we could, but as I tried to explain, I fundamentally don't think 
we _should_.

Why should people _ever_ be asked about whether they want "E1000 PCI 
support" vs "E1000 PCI-E" support, when it's almost impossible to tell 
which kind of card you have?

In other words, I suspect that anybody who selects E1000 support would 
actually want the "support both" case, and simply not care. Unless they 
were _really_ deeply aware of their hardware.

> AFAICT, this makes "make oldconfig" always give the same support that the 
> the earlier kernel had and people get set it to what they actually want if 
> they notice.

.. but that said, I think your patch is certainly better than what we have 
now (or what Ingo was complaining about for the next merge window). I 
certainly could live with it. I would just suggest against ever then 
removing that "generic E1000" choice.

		Linus
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