On Fri, 2012-07-13 at 13:37 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
So this has long been one of my pet configuration peeves: as a user I am perfectly happy answering the questions about what kinds of hardware I want the kernel to support (I kind of know that), but many of the "support infrastructure" questions are very opaque, and I have no idea which of the them any particular distribution actually depends on. [...] The point I'm slowly getting to is that I would actually love to have *distro* Kconfig-files, where the distribution would be able to say "These are the minimums I *require* to work". So we'd have a "Distro" submenu, where you could pick the distro(s) you use, and then pick which release, and we'd have something like
I like this idea in principle. [...]
- distro/Kconfig:
config DISTRO_REQUIREMENTS bool "Pick minimal distribution requirements"
choice DISTRO prompt "Distribution" depends on DISTRO_REQUIREMENTS
config FEDORA config OPENSUSE config UBUNTU ...
endchoice
and then depending on the DISTRO config, we'd include one of the distro-specific ones with lists of supported distro versions and then the random config settings for that version:
You might also want to *un*select some options like CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED and CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2 that need to be set one way or the other depending on the version of udev. (I think it's possible to kluge this with the addition of a hidden negative config option.) How about stuff like NET and INET, that every distro will need and yet is configurable even without EXPERT? [...]
Sure, you can copy the config file that came with the distro, but it has tons of stuff that really isn't required. Not just in hardware, but all the debug choices etc that are really a user choice. And it's really hard to figure out - even for somebody like me - what a minimal usable kernel is. [...]
And it's still hard for me as kernel packager: just because an option was requested and enabled to support some bit of userland, doesn't mean I know what's using or depending on it now. (I think Dave Jones made this point already.) I'm not usually concerned with *minimal* config. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. - Robert Coveyou