svn 16009: what the...?

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 10 September 2006 11:52 pm, Jason Schoon wrote:
> On 9/10/06, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> >
> > svn 16009:
> > +#if ENABLE_NITPICK
> > +#warning rename to xferror_filename?
> > +#endif
> >
> > svn 15701:
> > +CHECKED_CFLAGS+=$(call check_cc,$(HOSTCC),-Werror,)
> >
> > Does anyone else see a problem with this?
> 
> 
> Yes, it annoyed me greatly when I turned on CONFIG_NITPICK the other day.
> Never got around to tracking it down, but that is definitely not acceptable.

The purpose of CONFIG_NITPICK is to hide configuration options of questionable 
utility.  Things that save less trivial amounts of space or require a fairly 
deep knowledge of the internals in order to figure out exactly what they do.

This way we can have more granular configuration without swamping everybody in 
complexity.  It's essentially CONFIG_ADVANCED, except the name was chosen to 
point out that these config options don't actually _need_ to exist, in most 
cases this is just an alternative to going into the source code and tweaking 
it by hand.

The problem with actually making CONFIG_NITPICK work properly is that 
menuconfig is brain-damaged.  Visibility is tied to selection state, and 
hidden menu items default to "n" rather than to their default value, so 
there's no way to have a CONFIG_NITPICK item that's on and which 
CONFIG_NITPICK lets you switch off.  And it's not our idiom to have CONFIG 
items that disable functionality rather than add it.  That's why I've put 
CONFIG_NITPICK on hold until the build infrastructure gets resynced with a 
more recent Linux kernel, since upgrading the current infrastructure before 
that's kind of silly.

However, despite what 16009 seems to think, CONFIG_NITPICK is not the BusyBox 
equivalent of UCLIBC_MJN3_ONLY, and it's generally nice to build the tree 
with your changes enabled.  (If not immediately, then at least some time over 
the next two weeks would be nice.)

I have this thing about warnings.  I worked hard to get them OUT of the tree, 
and I don't want them creeping back in unnoticed.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.