On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 06:41:39PM +0200, Quentin Garnier wrote:
 > On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 03:33:17PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
 > > I would like to see some changes for the way the default configurations
 > > are handled. We currently have a lot of small variations between GENERIC
 > > and GENERIC_LAPTOP on i386 and I expect most development e.g. of PCI
 > > drivers to happen on that platform or at least to be tested on it.
 > > When new PCI drivers are added, changes are high that *other* platforms
 > > are even less like to get all entries than GENERIC_LAPTOP to stay in
 > > sync with GENERIC.
 > > [...]

If the issue is just keeping all the assorted GENERICs in sync, it's
probably easier to set up some kind of automatic cross-checking. E.g.,
one could write a cron job that extracts all the pci devices from each
GENERIC*, remembers the diffs among the lists, and mails out any
changes that appear.

I do think the size of configs is getting out of hand and some steps
should be taken to allow them to be more concise (not just GENERIC,
but also custom configs) -- but I think those steps are going to want
to be larger and more comprehensive than what's been proposed, and I
think it's important to take the time to work out exactly what configs
should be going forward. I rather doubt there's widespread agreement. :-/

 > The last point is important to me:  if we do this, we might as well
 > change the syntax for something much more flexible (like, say, a markup
 > language rumoured to be extensible, or a subset of it, for which we have
 > a parser).

Er, that would be less flexible, not more...

-- 
   - David A. Holland / dholland@eecs.harvard.edu