Conversation
corbet

Jonathan Corbet

For a while now, the kernel's configuration and build systems have been an area of concern for me. Almost nobody truly understands those complex subsystems, which were handled by a single maintainer.

That maintainer, Masahiro Yamada, has just stepped down after eight years on the job:

https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=8d6841d5cb20

Happily, Nathan Chancellor and Nicolas Schier have agreed to pick up the build system. The configuration system, instead, is now unmaintained. That ... seems less than optimal.

Thanks to Masahiro for doing this work all these years, and to Nathan and Nicolas for stepping up!
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geert@society.oftrolls.com

Geert Uytterhoeven

Reply to

@jani @corbet Kconfig is used in other projects.

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irogers@fosstodon.org

Ian Rogers

Reply to

@jani @corbet just wanted to advertise the Python reimplementation (it's a shame to me that something like this isn't in the Linux tree):
https://github.com/ulfalizer/Kconfiglib/tree/master
Perhaps it could be ported from curses to a more modern console ui like textual.

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corbet

Jonathan Corbet

Reply to @irogers@fosstodon.org
@irogers @jani Interesting. It claims to be used by projects like Zephyr, but has no activity in five years...are those projects maintaining their own forks?
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march38@mstdn.social

march38

Reply to @corbet

@corbet @jani @irogers kconfiglib has always been "vendored" in Zephyr https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commits/main/scripts/kconfig

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march38@mstdn.social

march38

Reply to @corbet

@corbet it could have been worse, at least the maintainer did not suddenly go "off-grid" while not leaving any key behind... https://github.com/pypi/support/issues/2526

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landley@mstdn.jp

Rob Landley

Reply to @corbet

@corbet I've recently been writing my own replacement for kconfig over at https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/scripts/kconfig.c but the kernel community got toxic enough I stepped way the heck back from it in something like 2017. (And that was before kconfig became turing complete in 2018, so "make allnoconfig" could rm -rf your home directory. And developed lexx/yacc dependencies.)

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dagmcr@fosstodon.org

Daniel Gomez

Reply to

@llvm @geert @jani @corbet
We do have a kconfig fork integrated in kdevops with yaml output support. This was not desirable upstream but it was the initial goal. FYI, here the RFC from @mcgrof:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240823034455.3593819-1-mcgrof@kernel.org/

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soaproot@sfba.social

soaproot

Reply to @corbet

@corbet Every build system I have worked with seems to be overcomplicated and yet also kind of hard to do simple-ish things in. I have therefore (reluctantly) decided this is actually a hard problem.

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