Re: [ANNOUNCE] GSoC project: Improving kconfig using a SAT solver

From: david
Date: Tue May 18 2010 - 02:04:06 EST


On Mon, 17 May 2010, James Bottomley wrote:

On Mon, 2010-05-17 at 16:21 +0200, Vegard Nossum wrote:
On 17 May 2010 15:21, James Bottomley

Even if the problem is different from zypper's, it is also here
possible to get an unsatisfiable instance. You are right that, yes,
the kconfig files on their own should always be satisfiable. But
that's before the user has made any choices at all. An example of an
unsatisfiable instance would be one where the user demands that 1.
some USB driver is enabled, while 2. USB support in general is
disabled.

Actually, these are two separate problems. The first is basic
consistency within the Kconfig subsytstem (something that select
currently damages for us). The second is what to present to the user,
which is where the inception of the select problem came from. A user
doesn't really want to know that USB device X depends on usb storage,
SCSI and a raft of other things ... they just want it to configure a
kernel that supports their device. In particular, we don't want to
present every possible option to users and then try to work out a
solution, we really need guided configuration (which, in some measure,
is what we have today: if you don't select general USB, you won't see
any USB drivers. Or more importantly, if you select an Adaptec SCSI
card, we just enable whichever transport library it needs).

There are two modes people can be in when configuring a kernel.

1. I want to configure a kernel to support my hardware, enable anything else needed to make it work.

2. I really care about having a small kernel, don't enable anything I have disabled (but help me figure out why something I want isn't available)

I don't think that hiding hardware from the user is ever the best thing to do. for approach #1 you obviously don't want to hide anything, but even for approach #2, someone may not realize that by disabling one option they are making it impossible to support something, and as someone who spent a bunch of time hunting through config to find options that I ended up finding were not available without enabling something else, I much prefer to see the option, but see it disabled rather than not being sure if it should be there, or somewhere else in the config.

David Lang
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