Subject: Re: Refactoring MI devices in GENERIC and friends
To: Quentin Garnier <cube@cubidou.net>
From: David Holland <dholland+netbsd@eecs.harvard.edu>
List: tech-kern
Date: 09/08/2007 14:07:31
On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 06:41:39PM +0200, Quentin Garnier wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 03:33:17PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> > I would like to see some changes for the way the default configurations
> > are handled. We currently have a lot of small variations between GENERIC
> > and GENERIC_LAPTOP on i386 and I expect most development e.g. of PCI
> > drivers to happen on that platform or at least to be tested on it.
> > When new PCI drivers are added, changes are high that *other* platforms
> > are even less like to get all entries than GENERIC_LAPTOP to stay in
> > sync with GENERIC.
> > [...]
If the issue is just keeping all the assorted GENERICs in sync, it's
probably easier to set up some kind of automatic cross-checking. E.g.,
one could write a cron job that extracts all the pci devices from each
GENERIC*, remembers the diffs among the lists, and mails out any
changes that appear.
I do think the size of configs is getting out of hand and some steps
should be taken to allow them to be more concise (not just GENERIC,
but also custom configs) -- but I think those steps are going to want
to be larger and more comprehensive than what's been proposed, and I
think it's important to take the time to work out exactly what configs
should be going forward. I rather doubt there's widespread agreement. :-/
> The last point is important to me: if we do this, we might as well
> change the syntax for something much more flexible (like, say, a markup
> language rumoured to be extensible, or a subset of it, for which we have
> a parser).
Er, that would be less flexible, not more...
--
- David A. Holland / dholland@eecs.harvard.edu