help text on a "choice" entry isn't displayable

Robert P. J. Day rpjday at crashcourse.ca
Thu Jul 17 18:39:03 UTC 2008


On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, Denys Vlasenko wrote:

> On Thursday 17 July 2008 13:14, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >
> >   just an observation that any help text associated with a "choice"
> > entry in a Config.in isn't currently displayable while you're doing a
> > "make menuconfig".
> >
> >   for example, in Config.in, you have:
> >
> > choice
> >         prompt "Buffer allocation policy"
> >         default FEATURE_BUFFERS_USE_MALLOC
> >         help
> >           There are 3 ways BusyBox can handle buffer allocations:
> >           - Use malloc. This costs code size for the call to xmalloc.
> >           - Put them on stack. For some very small machines with limited stack
> >             space, this can be deadly.  For most folks, this works just fine.
> >           - Put them in BSS. This works beautifully for computers with a real
> >             MMU (and OS support), but wastes runtime RAM for uCLinux. This
> >             behavior was the only one available for BusyBox versions 0.48 and
> >             earlier.
> >
> > config FEATURE_BUFFERS_USE_MALLOC
> >         bool "Allocate with Malloc"
> >
> > ... etc etc ...
>
> I think that there are two sensible approaches to build system:
>
> 1. overhaul it, removing all kernel-related unused parts
>  or
> 2. leave it alone, do only fixes for real problems
>
> If you are inclined to choose road #1, it's ok.
>
> I for the time being have more pressing needs (improving hush and
> fixing testsuite failures, of which we have plenty), and as long as
> build system works ok, I can live with that cruft inside it.
>
> If somebody will post patches, that will be interesting.

as i mentioned earlier, this isn't restricted to BB -- the stock
kernel tree has the same issue.  so i mentioned this on the kbuild
list and, if a fix is introduced to the kernel tree, i can just grab
that fix and submit it for BB as well.  no point investing any time to
fix this just for BB -- let the kbuild folks do the work.  :-)

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
========================================================================



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