James Bottomley wrote: > On Sun, 2007-09-09 at 23:22 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: >> When it costs 10000 people half an hour to learn and correct this it >> wasted 5000 hours of previous livetime. >> >> Besides there is no good reason to have ever learned this imho. > > The process of becoming an expert in the kernel build system naturally > involves making mistakes and learning from them, so this is probably > time reasonably well spent. Nevertheless we should try to arrange the menus in a way that makes sense to as many people as possible. The difficulty is, different environments call for different menu layouts, as your previous example of SATA DVD-only boxes demonstrates. However, liberal usage of 'select' is not the ultimate solution to create menus that work for more people. Just one problem with select is that it works behind the back of the people configuring kernels (unless they use an UI with debug options turned on) --- they have less control, they are less informed. ATA already 'select's SCSI. What do we gain from hiding the fact that Linux' SCSI option is not just for those 50-wire ribbons (which people still think SCSI stands for) but is a very central Linux subsystem for even more than what complies to the SCSI family of standards? 'select' should really be limited to switch on small library-like code without further dependencies or requirements. SCSI, together with its upper layer options, is not of this kind of library. We should think about order and grouping of prompts and the labels of prompts (there were already suggestions in this discussion) before we resort to 'select' --- or even worse, select options unconditionally which are not always necessary to be enabled. A pro pos grouping of options --- consider how options for another central subsystem are laid out: Networking Networking options ... TCP/IP networking ... ... Device Drivers ... Network device support ... Ethernet (10 or 100MBit) ... ... This also happens to reflect the layout of sources in directories, and the current SCSI menu layout is close to source layout too --- but it doesn't have to be that way. -- Stefan Richter -=====-=-=== =--= -=-=- http://arcgraph.de/sr/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
