having championed the cause of adding those two code maturity levels to init/Kconfig, i just realized that implementing them as simple dependencies has a *really* annoying shortcoming.
in order to display that a kernel config feature is experimental, developers have not only made that feature depend on EXPERIMENTAL, but they've also had to *explicitly* add the trailer "(EXPERIMENTAL)" to the prompt line in the Kconfig file, to make it visually obvious. obviously, it would be *way* nicer if that trailer were produced on the fly for any "EXPERIMENTAL" feature, just as it would be for OBSOLETE or DEPRECATED (or any other maturity levels people can dream up). one solution is to hack Kconfig to look for specific dependencies that represent maturity levels and add them automatically to those respective lines. doable, but kind of hacky. another solution is to add a new keyword like "status" or "maturity", so that: config EXT4DEV_FS tristate "Ext4dev/ext4 extended fs support development (EXPERIMENTAL)" depends on EXPERIMENTAL ... becomes simply: config EXT4DEV_FS tristate "Ext4dev/ext4 extended fs support development" maturity EXPERIMENTAL ... internally, it could still be treated as a simple dependency, and everything would still work. you know, this seemed so simple at first ... rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://fsdev.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page ======================================================================== - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/