On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 06:20:09PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > am, but I'm willing to do it only if I have a feeling that things are > under control. And I'm not getting that feeling. > > - TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND lines of arch/arm is just pure garbage, namely the > defconfig files. Quite frankly, anybody who calls that anything but > pure "noise" is just misguided and being stupid. > > So yes, I do consider a lot of it "noise". When there's two hundred > thousand lines of garbage, and it keeps growing without bounds, something > needs to be done. > > Now, I'm actually considering just getting rid of all the 'defconfig' > files entirely. The x86 model is sane (there's two of them, nobody likely > uses them), but ARM and POWERPC (and to a lesser config SH and MIPS) have > turned the whole concept into a disgusting mess. > > But while POWERPC has abused that thing too, in _other_ respects it has > been much less egregious. unfortunately there are so many different variants of the ARM architecture that these defconfigs spring up to ensure that a base compile for each one of them is performed. We run an autobuild which runs through all these defconfigs and produces a report of what happened to allow tracking of build regressions at the moment. > So I can largely fix the defconfig mess on my own (by just using a simple > oneliner shell script to deletes them all) but that really only fixes one > particularly annoying symptom - not the underlying issue. We do need > somebody to maintain the arm platform mess, and actually tries to get some > infrastructure or something in place so that it doesn't explode. Someone should defiently cull the older defconfigs for sepcific machines, many of which probably don't get built for mainline. ~ > > The fact is that ARM-based devices multiply like rabbits, and there is > > a huge amount of diversity between the various derivatives. Also, > > support most of these devices has lived out of tree for a long time. > > Now that we have a relatively direct path which doesn't require any > > single person to have to understand all the mind-numbing details of > > all of these ARM-based platforms, it has allowed us to significantly > > improve the support for these devices upstream. Anything that is > > common to all devices still goes through RMK. > > The thing is, I bet there is way more commonality still to be taken > advantage of. And even if there isn't, we need somebody who cares, and > doesn't just mindlessly aggregate all the crud. Somebody with the taste to > say "ok, that's just too effin ugly, you need to fix things up" > occasionally. yes, there is that problem, and many of the big company players have yet to really see the necessity in this... It has taken a while now to convince the necessary people at Samsung that simply copying and modifying existing driver/support is simply not going to fly. -- Ben (ben@xxxxxxxxx, http://www.fluff.org/) 'a smiley only costs 4 bytes' -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arm-msm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
