Heads up: Linus plans to kill ARM defconfigs

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2010 at 08:51:07AM +1200, Ryan Mallon wrote:
> Striping the spitz defconfig back for example:
> 
>   ryan at okiwi:configs$ wc -l spitz_defconfig
>   1820 spitz_defconfig
> 
>   ryan at okiwi:configs$ grep -v "is not set" spitz_defconfig | grep -v
> "^#" | wc -l
>   641
> 
> So removing all the comments and non-set options makes the defconfig
> about 1/3 the size. If the defconfigs were generated by hand, or a
> proper set of tools, then they could be much less verbose and diffs for
> things like adding or removing a single config option would actually be
> readable.

Have you tried to use this stripped back defconfig file?

> I think deleting defconfigs is a good first step. Although there will be
> diffstat noise, it will also be clear that the net result is that
> thousands of lines are being removed, which is a good thing.

You're forgetting that if the defconfigs go, then kautobuild might as
well be taken offline because it'll have nothing to build.  It also
means it'll be pointless participating in the build side of linux-next
since that too won't have any useful build coverage.

And at that point, I won't know if the changes I make to the kernel
start breaking EP93xx or whatever other platform - and the same will
be true for other kernel developers.

What's at stake here is not just a bunch of files in the kernel.  It's
much more than that - it's our build testing coverage.

Of course, if people don't mind kernels being broken, and don't mind
changes not being integrated tested in linux-next, we should delete
the defconfig files right now because they wouldn't be serving much
of a useful purpose.