Re: [gentoo-user] Peeve - finding kernel config options

["Poison BL." <poisonbl@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Tanstaafl <tanstaafl@libertytrek.org> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> This is for those of use who to choose to roll our kernels by hand...
>
> So, am I missing something?
>
> Given the most recent gentoo news item:
>
>>  # eselect news read 10
>> 2014-02-25-udev-upgrade
>>   Title                     Upgrade to >=sys-fs/udev-210
>>   Author                    Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org>
>>   Posted                    2014-02-25
>>   Revision                  1
>>
>> The options CONFIG_FHANDLE and CONFIG_NET are now required in the kernel.
>
>
> Whenever kernel config options are provided like this, it would be nice if
> time was taken to provide the path to where they are found.
>
> I had to find the first one (CONFIG_FHANDLE) by:
>
> 1. grepping .config, seeing it wasn't enabled,
> 2. running make menuconfig and searching for 'FHANDLE',
> 3. seeing it is located in 'General setup',
> 4. scouring the General setup options, finding no 'FHANLDE' anywhere,
> 5. finding something in all lowercase named 'open by fhanlde syscalls',
> 6. enabling this option, saving the modified config,
> 7. confirming it is now enabled by grepping .config again
>
> Sheesh. Really?
>
> Would be nice if the news item had something like
> CONFIG_FHANDLE (General setup > 'open by fhandle syscalls')
> and
> CONFIG_NET (still don't know which one this is??)
>
> Wackadoo...
>

When I search FHANDLE in menuconfig I get:

  │ Symbol: FHANDLE [=y]
  │ Type  : boolean
  │ Prompt: open by fhandle syscalls
  │   Location:
  │ (1) -> General setup
  │   Defined at init/Kconfig:235
  │   Selects: EXPORTFS [=y]
  │   Selected by: GENTOO_LINUX_INIT_SYSTEMD [=y] && GENTOO_LINUX [=y]
&& GENTOO_LINUX_UDEV [=y]

This clearly states that the prompt you're looking for is a line that
says "open by fhandle syscalls" under "General setup"

Sure, it's not the absolute simplest interface (i.e. it doesn't give a
'enable this' in the search results) but it does give all the
necessary information about a given option to find it (as well as
dependencies and their current states, etc). The most likely reason
the news item doesn't list the specific "prompt" text (or even the
category) is that, across even sub release versions of the kernel
those are prone to change (and, at times, drastically) while the
actual CONFIG_<name> option tends to be fairly static through time
once it exists (even when superseded by new toys, i.e. older
IDE/ATA/ATAPI options vs newer PATA options).

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy