RFC: NO_FOO knobs in make.conf

[Doug Barton]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, M. Warner Losh wrote:

> I liked the NetBSD approach, once Bruce mentioned it, but thought I'd
> wait to see what people came up with before getting into things too
> much at length.

Yeah, I had exactly the same feeling. I didn't want to stifle anyone's
creativity. :)

But since his is the best suggestion I've seen so far, and because it
increases our compatibility with netbsd, I'd like to refine step one of
my plan as follows:

1. All new Makefile knobs, in all branches, should have WORD_SEPARATORS
between distinct English words. Internal variables should be in the form
NO_FOO. In HEAD, and the eventual RELENG_5, knobs that are intended to
be exposed to users should be in the form MK_FOO. Anything that isn't
defined as "no" is assumed to be "yes."

This gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of how we use the knobs,
and how we define defaults going down the road. So for example, I'd like
to have more fine grained control over what BIND bits we build, so I
plan to introduce a MK_BIND_NAMED knob that controls the build of named
itself, and friends like ndc. Initially I'll default this to on, but
eventually I forsee switching it to off.

Thoughts?

Doug

PS, I'll be at the tech sessions Wed-Fri if anyone wants to discuss this
in person.

-- 

    This .signature sanitized for your protection