On Monday 09 June 2008 16:27:29 Leon Woestenberg wrote: > > I submitted a patch to remove the use of perl to build the linux kernel > > (which HPA added in 2.6.25) not because it affected the result, but > > because it unnecessarily complicates the build system. (And perl tends > > to metasticize. > > Thanks, I hope it is or gets accepted. Nope, Peter Anvin shot it down (saying what I was doing was a strange, purely academic exercise), and Sam Ravnborg announced his vague intention to rewrite large chunks of kbuild in perl in the future. (Because nothing says "maintainability" like perl...) For some reason they wanted to mail me about it off-list rather than cc:ing the list about this plan. A number of embedded people emailed me about it off list, but nobody ever replied to my post _on_ the list to say I wasn't alone in this, or acked the patch to say it worked for them, or anything like that. So there was a perception of zero support, and I gave up trying to follow up on it for 2.6.25. I've got it working for me, and if more perl shows up I'll come up with more patches to remove it for my own personal build environment. I might try to submit again in a few months, but in the meantime my patches are at http://landley.net/hg/firmware/file/tip/sources/patches/ (see the linux-*noperl*.patch one). Maybe I'll try linux-kernel again. I submitted my miniconfig patches something like three times. But if the guys on the list didn't want it, and the guys in the embedded world poking me to do something about it weren't willing to even ack the darn patch on the list, and the people who want changes made to it aren't willing to change it from what I'm happy with to what they want and expect me to do it for them when I'm already happy with it... My todo list is long. This goes somewhere after resorting the contents of my bookshelves. I've found that posting to linux-kernel tends to attract "belling the cat" ideas. For example, I use kconfig in toybox and I posted patches to make it easier to use kconfig in other, non-kernel projects. The resulting thread turned into a grandiose plan about a separate kconfig that would be maintained as a spearate project and get installed on your system ala make, for use by any source package that wants that functionality. To which my response was "feel free, I have no interest in doing that, did you want my patches or not?" Improvements in the UI to use miniconfigs were held up by people objecting to how they were generated, which is separate from how they're used. And one of peter's objections to the perl removal patch (which basically checked the precalculated header file into the tree) was that some out of tree mips patch that never got merged might want to let you enter the clock speed as an input field, so you can't possibly just rely on precalculated values and people who want to check in code using a new value checking in an updated header with that value. (Even though that makes every existing architecture happy, last I checked.) I'm a hobbyist. I made it work for me. If nobody else is interested in what I did, I'm ok with that... Rob -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
