Re: [PATCH] 9p: fix compile error if !CONFIG_SYSCTL

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

On Saturday 29 September 2007 00:34, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > > God I hate select.
> >
> > IMO a better implementation would result in a notification / confirmation
> > of turning on new items, and the ability to deselect options which will
> > also confirm to deselect dependants. Like most other systems that have
> > similar problem to solve.
>
> Actually, the *really* nice thing to do would be to just add the reason
> something got enabled into the ".config" file.
>
> IOW, wouldn't it be nice if the .config file just said
>
> 	...
> 	CONFIG_ACPI=y		# selected by X86_64_ACPI_NUMA
> 	CONFIG_ACPI_PROCFS=y	# user choice
> 	...
>
> etc, since the config process actually does know these things?

Sure, that would probably be pretty trivial to implement too, and
would solve most problems for kernel devs.

At a level up from that, I think ease of use could be improved with
a package manager-type chained-selection/deselection feature in
the config tools.

Not that I'm volunteering to implement either ;)

>
> That way, there's always a fairly straightforward way to see why some
> configuration is the way it is (and the .config file is not only useful
> for "make oldconfig", it's also what normally gets passed around for bug
> reports, and is part of distro kernel packages etc, so it would seem to be
> the right place, no?)
>
> 		Linus