view kconfig/README @ 1756:dbee4e656aa6 draft

Explain the craptacular nature of kconfig, and the plan to replace it.
author Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
date Thu, 26 Mar 2015 13:25:20 -0500
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This is a snapshot of linux 2.6.12 kconfig as washed through busybox and
further modified by Rob Landley.

Way back when I tried to push my local changes to kconfig upstream
in 2005 https://lwn.net/Articles/161086/
and 2006 http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0607.0/1805.html
and 2007 http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0707.1/1741.html
each of which spawned long "I think you should go do this and this and this
but I'm not going to lift a finger personally" threads from the kernel
developers. Twice I came back a year later to see if there was any interest
in what I _had_ done, and the third thread was the longest of the lot but
no code was merged as a result.

*shrug* That's the linux-kernel community for you. I had an easier time
than the author of squashfs, who spent 5 years actively trying to get his code
merged, finally quitting his job to spend an unpaid year working on upstreaming
squashfs _after_ after every major Linux distro had been locally carrying it
for years. No really, here's where he wrote about it himself:

https://lwn.net/Articles/563578/

This code is _going_away_. Rewriting it is low priority, but removing it is a
checklist item for the 1.0 toybox release. This directory contains the only
GPL code left in the tree, and none of its code winds up in the resulting
binary. It's just an editor that reads our Config.in files to update the top
level .config file; you can edit they by hand if you really want to.