Re: config(5) break down

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 01:14:51AM +0900, Masao Uebayashi wrote:
 > > ?> > (Besides, it's not necessarily as flat as all that, either.)
 > > ?>
 > > ?> It's necessary to be flat to be modular.
 > >
 > > Mm... not strictly. That's only true when there are diamonds in the
 > > dependency graph; otherwise, declaring B inside A just indicates that
 > > B depends on A. Consider the following hackup of files.ufs:
 > 
 > There're diamonds (for example, ppp-deflate depends on ppp and zlib).

Sure. But mostly there aren't.

 > > [...]
 > > module UFS [...]
 > > module FFS [...]
 > > module MFS [...]
 > > module EXT2FS [...]
 > > module LFS [...]
 > 
 > In this plan, what *.kmod will be generated?

The ones declared? Or one big one, or one per source file, or whatever
the blazes you want, actually...

 > > I'm perfectly happy to rework the parser to support syntax like the
 > > above if we can all agree on what it should be.
 > 
 > So you're proposing a syntax change without understanding the
 > existing syntax? (You don't know what braces are for, you didn't
 > know "define" behavior, ...)  I have to say that your proposal is
 > not convincing to me...

Um. I know perfectly well that config currently uses braces for
something else. That's irrelevant. There's no need to use braces for
grouping; it just happens to be readily comprehensible to passersby.
There's an infinite number of possible other grouping symbols that can
be used, ranging from << >> to (! !) or even things like *( )*.
Furthermore, the existing use of braces can just as easily be changed
to something else if that seems desirable.

There's a reason I said "syntax like the above" and "if we can all
agree on what it should be". That wasn't a concrete proposal, it
wasn't meant to be a concrete proposal, no concrete proposal is
complete without an analysis of whether the grammar remains
unambiguous, and nitpicking it on those grounds is futile.

You seem to be completely missing the point.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost