Heads up: Linus plans to kill ARM defconfigs

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 04:51:24PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> Linus wants something to be done about the current defconfig mess which 
> is perfectly legitimate.  He even suggested a possible solution.  I 
> don't think he'll simply drop those defconfig files if we demonstrate 
> that we're taking action to fix the actual problem.

However, having a set of patches which combine a load of defconfig
files into one is not going to solve the problem.

If you're hypothesis that Linus is only looking at the diffstat, then
what are patches to combine the defconfigs going to do?  It's going
to create lots of noise in arch/arm/configs/ - which is precisely what
Linus is complaining about.  In fact, patch-wise it's going to create
an extremely large patch.  And if we do this time and time again while
progressively reducing the defconfigs.  No, this isn't the answer -
it's only going to make the problem worse.

I believe the only acceptable solution is to get an alterative method
in place - no matter what it is - and remove the all but one of the
defconfig files from the mainline kernel.  _And_, most importantly,
kautobuild needs to be fixed so that we still get build coverage.

The loss of kautobuild is a major concern here, and I believe it trumps
everything else for the next merge window.  Kautobuild is an extremely
important resource that we simply can not afford to lose.