INCLUDE_CONFIG_FILE in GENERIC

[Robert N. M. Watson]

On 14 Jan 2010, at 20:01, Doug Barton wrote:

> FWIW, I actually think this makes it worse, not better. The
> INCLUDE_CONFIG_FILE option should include everything needed to recreate
> the kernel. If it doesn't, it's worse than worthless, it leads to a
> false sense of security which makes it dangerous. I wasn't actually
> aware that if you do the config -C trick that you'll get ONLY the one
> file, not everything.

(...more irritated words stripped like the comments in a config file...)

I agree. I see two kinds of users:

- Desktop/server users who want their system to work without any special tuning or magic, and likely feel the comments they put in configuration files are important
- Users who care a about a few hundred bytes of comments due to the nature of their special embedded hardware target environment

As such, I see a reasonable "default" -- i.e., i386/amd64 GENERIC -- be to fully preserve the configuration and its comments. For the embedded and appliance crowds, I definitely want them to be able to fully exclude the configuration (by not including the option). I don't see a lot of merit to supporting stripping the comments, but if someone wants that special case, I'm OK with supporting it, but I think it's an unuseful default for the desktop/server platforms.

Robert