On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 08:47 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote: > On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 23:49, James Bottomley > <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > [Sam: I know you don't maintain kbuild anymore, but since you have the > > most experience, if you could find time to comment, I'd be grateful] > > > > 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. > > What if there's a good reason the selected symbol has this dependency? > E.g. it depends on a critical feature not available? Like CONFIG_HAS_IOMEM? I don't quite understand the question. If a selected symbol has a critical dependency which is config'd to N then the build usually breaks ... that's what I'm calling the select problem. I thought CONFIG_HAS_IOMEM was usually selected by the architecture, though. In the new proposal, we wouldn't be able to generate the invalid configuration in the first place. James -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html