Nogobble, nogobble

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Brett Glass wrote:

> The notion of creating directives to reverse those in a file of defaults 
> (the most amusing one being "nocpu", which sounds as if one is saying 
> that the system has no CPU) shows how absurd this approach is. Yes, it's 
> handy to have defaults; however, if one is building a custom kernel at 
> all one is most likely building something vastly different from the 
> original or it would not be worth doing at all. He or she and should 
> expect to specify in detail what will be included in it. Copying GENERIC 
> (or LINT, which is now absent but used to be extremely handy) and then 
> editing it is a far better and less error-prone way of crafting a kernel 
> than having to inspect a file and then hopping back and forth to another 
> editor window disabling EVERYTHING in the first file you don't want 
> (which can be quite a list if you're trimming down the statically linked 
> portions of the kernel to the hardware that your machine actually has).

In practice, I've found the include mechanism extremely valuable in 
keeping a number of variations on a single kernel synchronized.  For 
example, when configuring systems, I often have a UP configuration, an SMP 
configuration, sometimes a couple of specific extension kernels, and a 
full debugging version of each.  While the current mechanism still allows 
me to do it the old way, that approach is prone to error: what I want is a 
single base configuration (be it GENERIC or RWATSON or whatever), and then 
a series of variations that I can easily maintain.  If you prefer to copy 
GENERIC, no one is stopping you, but I find the copy-and-paste approach 
quite error prone in practice, especially when tracking a branch, as it 
requires manual propagation of changes to all the kernel configurations.

BTW, LINT does exist, but it is generated dynamically using "make LINT" in 
the configuration directory.  This combines both cross-architecture and 
architecture-specific NOTES entries to produce a kernel configuration.

Robert N M Watson