Re: cleaning up the Kconfig menu structure -- the bigger picture

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 07:16:18AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

  somewhat related to dan malek's posting, but i think part of the 
problem with trying to figure out what the menuconfig menus should 
support is that the relevant options are organized in a confusingly 
haphazard way.

I suppose it's confusing from how it used to be, but not so much from a
how everyone else chooses stuff way.  For example...
[snip]

  consider, first, serial port options.  if you choose 8xx, then 
you'll be presented with the menu choices:

  Device Drivers -->
    Character devices -->
      Serial drivers -->
        CPM SCC/SMC serial port support --> etc, etc.

Which is where every other serial driver is (that's been updated to use
the new serial core and make life easier).

[snip]

  in that case, if you wanted to configure "CPM SCC Ethernet", why 
would you go under "MPC8xx CPM Options" rather than the general 
networking menu?  this is clearly inconsistent.

Because the CPM1/CPM2 enet drivers are still waiting to be cleaned up a
bit more, and moved there.  The FEC enet driver that Pantelis wrote
lives in drivers/net/ for example.

  more to the point, i've always found it a bit strange that selecting 
"8xx" as a processor would suddenly cause the top-level "MPC8xx CPM 
Options" menu to appear, when other 8xx-related stuff was still 
scattered elswewhere throughout the kernel source tree.

That's kinda the opposite direction of where I want things to move.
What, IMHO, should happen is that once the real drivers side of 8xx_io
are moved out into drivers/ we'll really be left with commproc and
microcode, both of which can live in arch/ppc/syslib/ as cpm1_common.c
and cpm1_microcode.c respecivley and we can deal with microcode
questions in arch/ppc/Kconfig where we now source the 8xx_io/Kconfig
file (or, if it really does end up making sense to, and I'm not yet
convinced of this, make platforms/8xx, we can put the question in
platforms/8xx/Kconfig).

-- 
Tom Rini
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/