I am preparing a set of patches that clean up kconfig diagnostics and make it more consistent both internally and with respect to other tools (like compilers). However, a couple of changes that I would like to make could be controversial so I want to discuss them before wasting everyone's time with patches: 1. Add 'warning' word to $(warning-if) output: - fprintf(stderr, "%s:%d: %s\n", ...); + fprintf(stderr, "%s:%d: warning: %s\n", ...); This makes it consistent with the rest of the warnings printed by kconfig. 2. Print $(info) output to stderr instead of stdout. I realize the current behavior is consistent with GNU make (on which it is based) but at the same time it's inconsistent with the rest of kconfig (#1) or does not seem to make much sense (#2), at least to me. To elaborate on #2, $(info) is still diagnostics, just a different level compared to $(warning-if) and $(error-if). It's not clear to me why it should go to stdout. If we needed the ability to print something to stdout, we could add another function, such as $(print). However, I can't think of a good reason why we would need to; this, for example, has the potential to mess up with the terminal-based UI (which is written to stdout). I've done a search and as far as I can see, neither $(warning) nor $(info) is currently used anywhere in the kernel outside the kconfig testsuite. So these changes shouldn't have any backwards-compatibility issues. Thoughts?
