[Thinstation-developer] Suggestion for a 2.3 build.conf

[Mike E. <thi...@gm...>]

As most people realize, the current build.conf in 2.3cvs basically is
a 2.2.2 version and in no way up to date for 2.3.

The reasons for not already having a dedicated 2.3 build.conf are
several. First the number of drivers has exploded, i.e. there is
almost 200 NIC drivers alone. There is no way we can handle 200 NIC
entries in build.conf the way we have done it so far.

The other serious problem is that we use to have entries like:
#module 3c59x                   # 3c590/3c900 series (592/595/597)
"Vortex/Boomerang" support

Of course it is nice to have the comment/explanation for each module,
but there are serious problems with this. First the comments must be
reverse engineered for each individual driver. You can't just look it
up somewhere. This is a hopeless task with 200 drivers. Besides this
the comments aren't accurate and probably even misleading as very
often different NICs and chip sets actually use the same driver. This
has already been a problem with 2.2x. Example: in 2.6.35.7 there are
exactly 50 different products all using the e1000e driver.

So we can't maintain the old structure of build.conf. On the other
side TS 2.3 isn't the time to make drastic alterations of build.conf.
We are plenty delayed already, so we need an interim solution. I
promised Trevor I'd take a look at the problem. Please find attached
my first iteration on the problem. The attached build.conf isn't
completely worked through yet, but these parts are done: all NIC
moduless (wired, wireless, token ring, pcmcia), all sound modules, all
agp modules, all file system modules.

The two utilities tries to compensate for the missing comments. Their
interface can be improved :-)

Comments and ideas welcome. I'm aware it will break TSoM, but that's
an advanced feature at this time.

Mike
-- 
Operator of the Danish TS-O-Matic.
http://thinstation.org
- a light, full featured linux based thin client OS