Re: CML2 design philosophy heads-up

[Eric S. Raymond]

David Woodhouse <[e-mail]>:
> On one hand you have dependencies which are present to make life easier for 
> Aunt Tillie, by refraining from confusing her with strange questions to 
> which the answer is _probably_ 'no'. Like the question of whether she has 
> an IDE controller on her MVME board.
> 
> One the other hand, you have the dependencies present in the existing CML1
> configuration, which are _absolute_ dependencies - which specify for example
> that you cannot enable support for PCI peripherals if !CONFIG_PCI, etc.
> These dependencies are there to prevent you from enabling combinations of
> options which are utterly meaningless, and usually won't even compile.

There are no `advisory' dependencies in CML2.  They're all absolute.

What you call an `advisory' dependency would be simulated by having a 
policy symbol for Aunt Tillie mode and writing constraints like this:

require AUNT_TILLIE implies FOO >= BAR

This is exactly why the CML2 ruleset has EXPERT, WIZARD, and TUNING 
policy symbols, as hooks for doing things like this. 
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

No one who's seen it in action can say the phrase "government help" without
either laughing or crying.