Re: kbuild: fixing the select problem

[Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 23:49, James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> [Sam: I know you don't maintain kbuild anymore, but since you have the
> most experience, if you could find time to comment, I'd be grateful]
>
> The select problem is that the kbuild select directive will turn a
> symbol on without reference to its dependencies.  This, in turn, means
> that either selected symbols must select their dependencies, or that
> people using select have to be aware of the selected symbol's dependency
> and build those dependencies into their symbol (leading to duplication
> and the possibility of getting the dependencies out of sync).  We use
> select for the scsi transport classes, so we run into this problem in
> SCSI quite a lot.
>
> I think the correct fix is to make a symbol that selects another symbol
> automatically inherit all of the selected symbol's dependencies.

What if there's a good reason the selected symbol has this dependency?
E.g. it depends on a critical feature not available? Like CONFIG_HAS_IOMEM?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds