ARM defconfig files

[Linus Torvalds]

2010/7/12 Uwe Kleine-König <u.kleine-koenig at pengutronix.de>:
>
> I'm willing to try my solution, some others on the linux-arm-kernel
> lists considered it worth trying, too.  Feel free to pull my tree[1].
> Russell refused to take defconfig changes for a while now, so I don't
> expect merge problems if you do.

Well, I can hardly refuse a pull that removes almost 200k lines. So
I'd happily pull it. Just this single line in your email is a very
very powerful thing:

>  177 files changed, 652 insertions(+), 194157 deletions(-)

However, before I would pull, I'd definitely like to make sure we at
least have some way forward too, and clarify some issues. So I have a
couple of questions:

 - is this guaranteed to be a no-op as things stand now, and what are
the secondary effects of it?

   Put another way: I realize that fairly late in the -rc series is
actually a really good time to do this, rather than during the merge
window itself when things are in flux. However, while it would be a
good time to pull this for that reason, it's also a _horrible_ time to
pull if it then regresses the defconfig uses, or if it causes horrible
problems for linux-next merging etc.

 - what happens when somebody wants to update the defconfig files?

   This is a question that involves a number of people, because over
the last half year, we've had lots of people changing them. "git
shortlog -ns" on that ARM config directory gives 39 people in the last
half year, with the top looking roughly like

    26  Ben Dooks
    10  Tony Lindgren
     4  Haojian Zhuang
     4  Kukjin Kim
     3  Santosh Shilimkar
     3  Sriram
     2  Janusz Krzysztofik
    ....

and how are these people going to do their updates going forward
without re-introducing the noise?

IOW, I'd _love_ to get rid of almost 200k lines of noise and your
approach would seem to have the advantage that it's "invisible" to
users. But I would want to get some kind of assurance that it's
practical to do so.

                                  Linus