Re: [PATCH 2/2] Enable 'make CONFIG_FOO=y oldconfig'

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Wed, 2011-08-10 at 14:40 -0400, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
> so, at best, this buggy behavior is ~ 6 years old. Before that, I'd
> assume that the internal namespace was not accessible by any other
> mean than the front-ends.

I've been editing .config or doing 's/.*CONFIG_FOO[= ].*/CONFIG_FOO=y/'
on it for a decade before that. With all the same limitations as
all.config, and my new CONFIG_FOO=y command line support.

How do *you* quickly, from the command line, enable or disable a single
option in an existing config?

> > Please, if this offends you then by all means go and fix it. A sane way
> > of handling dependencies would give a way to say "do what you need to do
> > in order to enable CONFIG_SATA_MV", and should remove the abomination of
> > 'select', which was introduced purely to work around that lack.
> >
> > But none of that is directly relevant in *this* thread.
> >
> to paraphrase you, I'd say, this might looks "cute but might give
> behavior that people will come to depend on in their scripts and then
> we take it away again", "that's why I'd kind of like to see it done
> *once*, *properly*".

That's a reasonable concern, but I think it's misplaced in this case.
We're not enabling anything that we're later going to break. I can't see
many people *depending* on the fact that 'make CONFIG_SATA_MV=y
oldconfig' actually does *nothing* in some cases.

When we later, hopefully, get proper dependency resolution, that will
take something that *wasn't* working and make it work. For all.config
and for the command line overrides (and in other places) at the same
time.

-- 
dwmw2