I don't have any real problem with this. The shell script is really a
fairly old thing, and due to mostly nobody wanting to write the parsing
routines when it could be done with an existing program. Rewriting the
thing in C might allow us to have a nicer Config script format: the
current one is obviously fairly defined by shell syntax (even though the
use of shell functions make it less obvious than it would otherwise be).
> But if they are C programs, then 'make config' will require the user to
> have a native C compiler and will take longer to start up. So I need
> your opinion about this.
We need a native C compiler anyway to compile the kernel: there are other
parts of the kernel that want a native compiler for table generation etc.
So that's not so much of a problem.
However, you really can't depend on some of the more esoteric libraries,
and that does include things like even just curses. So I'd suggest that
menuconfig and "config" be separate programs with separate link phases
that would only share the logic parts (parsing in-files, the variable
logic and the eventual write-out, for example).
I certainly hope the program is small enough that it doesn't take all that
long to compile.
Linus
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