Re: [RFC PATCH 00/23] arm: defconfigs: use kconfig fragments

[Olof Johansson]

On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Laura Abbott <labbott@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 12/07/2016 01:35 PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Wednesday, December 7, 2016 1:14:02 PM CET Olof Johansson wrote:
>>>>
>>>> - A "debug" fragment would be nice, to turn on common options that
>>>>   add a lot of useful runtime checks at the expense of performance
>>>>   or code size.
>>>
>>> Hmm, some of these might work but several useful debug options (in
>>> particular DEBUG_LL for early errors) are per-system/platform.
>>
>> I was thinking mostly of architecture-independent options, i.e.
>> the stuff that is in lib/Kconfig.debug but isn't too expensive
>> to be run in a regular test environment. Enabling those
>> for a build/boot automation environment would be particularly
>> useful as you'd catch more bugs that get introduced through
>> a random patch.
>>
>>>> - A "distro" fragment that turns on all loadable modules that are
>>>>   enabled by common distributions (e.g. two or more of
>>>>   debian/fedora/opensuse/gentoo), to let you build a drop-in
>>>>   replacement kernel for a shipping distro. This would also allow
>>>>   the distros to strip their own config files and just specify
>>>>   whatever differs from the others.
>>>
>>> Keeping this in sync with the distro kernel could be a bit awkward
>>> (and possibly churny).
>>
>> It would certainly need buy-in from distro maintainers. I've discussed
>> this with Laura Abbott in the past, and she was interested in
>> principle.
>>
>>       Arnd
>>
>
> Yes, I've gotten the request from multiple people now about having
> some Fedora config in mainline. I agree that churn and keeping in
> sync would be a concern. For a first pass, I was going to propose
> a minimal set of options that are unlikely to need to churn. Once
> those are agreed on, everything else could become a separate .config.
> My plan was to send a patch out around -rc2/-rc3 each cycle to sync
> up.


That sounds reasonable to me -- we could add it as
fedora_<something>_defconfig. Ideally just one per distro (for their
multi-platform target), if possible. Makes sense to get coverage of
this on builders, etc, as well.


-Olof