Re: kbuild: fixing the select problem

[Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>]

James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:
> 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.

You may want to have a look at a patch I proposed some time ago, which
at just warns of selecting options with unmet dependencies. I think it's
a better approach that forcing the selection of the dependencies:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/9/16/413

-- 
Catalin