On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Grant Likely wrote:

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Catalin Marinas
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 2010-07-14 at 00:04 +0100, Grant Likely wrote:

quoted

- It still doesn't resolve dependencies.  A solver would help with this.
  For the time being I work around the problem by running the generated
  config through 'oldconfig' and looking for differences.  If the files
  differ (ignoring comments and generateconfig_* options) after oldconfig,
  then the <board>_defconfig target returns a failure.  (but leaves the
  new .config intact so the user can resolve it with menuconfig).  This
  way at least the user is told when a Kconfig fragment is invalid.

It's not a solver but I'm pushing a patch to warn on selecting symbols
with unmet dependencies so that you can select further symbols (manual
solving). The patch is in linux-next but you also can grab it from:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/cmarinas/linux-2.6-cm.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=5d87db2d2a332784bbf2b1ec3e141486f4d41d6f

sfr and I were talking about your patch the other day.  Just warning
on incomplete dependencies is enough to make it actually workable for
me (without my ugly post-processing step).  I was very happy to hear
that it is in linux-next.

Last missing piece is being able to do "select FOO = n", which Stephen
is currently working on.

Instead of (or in addition to) warning for incomplete 
dependencies, I'd much prefer if the prerequisites were recursively 
selected automatically.  This way if some options are moved inside a 
submenu at some point with a config symbol for that subcategory 
(e.g. CONFIG_NETDEV_1000), or if the subsystem is reorganized into 
submodules that are required for some driver to work, then my 
config will still be fine.

For example, if I want CONFIG_MTD_CMDLINE_PARTS=y, the system may be 
smart enough to notice and automatically enable CONFIG_MTD and 
CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS without having to carry those in the defconfig.


Nicolas