Nogobble, nogobble

[Brett Glass]

At 02:36 AM 11/4/2005, Robert Watson wrote:

>In practice, I've found the include mechanism extremely valuable 
>in keeping a number of variations on a single kernel synchronized.

Don't get me wrong: an "include" mechanism can be useful for many 
reasons, not the least of which is that one can create blocks of 
directives one DOES want (for instance, for firewalling, bandwidth 
control, and/or Netgraph). But including a large number of devices, 
etc. and then having to disable them via "nogobble" directives is 
not the right way to go. It's error-prone and tedious, and it 
violates POLA. It can also make maintenance a nightmare (What if 
you're disabling a device that isn't there? How many files do you 
have to look through to determine what the final result of all the 
enabling, disabling, and overriding is? Especially since -- to my 
knowledge -- there's no way to print out the result of all of the 
directives that override one another?)

>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.

I hadn't tried this.... Thanks to the people who have pointed out 
that target in the Makefile.

--Brett Glass