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Date:      Sat, 13 Dec 1997 11:51:07 +1030
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Jonathan Mini <j_mini@efn.org>, The Classiest Man Alive <ksmm@cybercom.net>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Why so many steps to build new kernel? 
Message-ID:  <199712130121.LAA00751@word.smith.net.au>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 11 Dec 1997 01:34:07 -0800." <25819.881832847@time.cdrom.com> 

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> 
> >   We need to do this in three stages then :
> > 	1) decide what types of "configurability" we want to allow the config
> > 	utility to handle. compile-time options, compiled-in device, managing
> > 	LKMs (for now, I hope to see the kld code replace it) and other types
> > 	of kernel behavior would be a good idea too.
> > 	  Plausably, we could extend this to cover any sort of system
> > 	configuration, but whether we want to do that is what we'd talk about
> > 	in this stage. 
> 
> I think the above has actually been covered in some detail in this
> mailing list over the last 3 or 4 other times this topic has come up,
> but my own memory is faint on the details.  Perhaps those previously
> involved in raising this issue (was one of them Mike Smith, my memory

Guilty.  Search the archives for anything with my name and 
"metaconfiguration" in it, and you've got a pretty good chance of 
coming up with my previous proposal.

(All of Jordan's points are spot-on)

> o The new configuration format should still be ASCII and editable
>   by Mere Humans(tm), just in a format which is much more easily
>   machine-parsed.

Exactly.  The issue is not in the format of the generated configuration 
(which can easily remain *exactly* as it is right now), but in the 
metaconfiguration information used by the config-generation tool.

Once you have established the basic classes of configuration entities, 
and the rules that link them together, you can codify these in just 
about any format you like; text is good because CVS, emacs and vi all 
like it.

mike





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