Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 2 Aug 2009 09:26:48 -0400 (EDT) | From | "Robert P. J. Day" <> | Subject | any remaining interest in a Kbuild "maturity" level? |
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every few months or so, i wonder again if there's sufficient interest in implementing a Kbuild "maturity" level to allow a kernel builder to conveniently select or de-select kernel features of varying levels of maturity.
that was all covered here a while back:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/7593
in a nutshell, i think there's considerable value in adding a new Kconfig directive, "maturity", which would have values like:
config FUBAR maturity DEPRECATED or maturity OBSOLETE
where "maturity" describes the position along the life cycle of some feature -- anywhere from, say, BLEEDING_EDGE to EXPERIMENTAL all the way over to OBSOLETE, in much the same way EXPERIMENTAL is used now, but not as a simple dependency since that's just plain hacky. i think it makes more sense to introduce a whole new "attribute" for that, that would allow the user to, in short order, specify that he wanted to build a new kernel but not use any features that were, say, OBSOLETE or DEPRECATED.
the additional convenience of this new attribute means that, when you're configuring a kernel, you can have a "non-normal" maturity level automatically printed next to the option, so you can immediately see what is currently DEPRECATED or OBSOLETE, as opposed to the messy way it's done now, where config options and their EXPERIMENTAL-ness have a bad habit of getting out of sync, as you see here in crypto/Kconfig:
config CRYPTO_XCBC tristate "XCBC support" depends on EXPERIMENTAL
as you can see, there's a mismatch between what's printed and the fact that that config variable is EXPERIMENTAL, and that sort of mismatch happens fairly frequently.
i don't think this would be all that hard to implement, and it wouldn't be very disruptive -- the new directive could be added but, until it's used, it would have no effect whatever.
thoughts? or should i just forget this idea?
rday --
======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.
Web page: http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday "Kernel Newbie Corner" column @ linux.com: http://cli.gs/WG6WYX ========================================================================
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