RFC: collection of common distro configs?

RFC: collection of common distro configs?

[Rasmus Villemoes]

Hi there,

Does anybody know of a place where one can find a collection of .configs
from various distros? I think it might be useful to be able to grep
around to see what features are actually enabled by which distros.

Based on the domain name, I hoped linuxconfig.org would be such a place,
if so I cannot find it.

If no such collection exists, do others agree it might be useful? If so,
I'll be happy to throw up a repo somewhere and start collecting them.

Thanks,
Rasmus

Re: RFC: collection of common distro configs?

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 12:26 PM Rasmus Villemoes
<linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> Does anybody know of a place where one can find a collection of .configs
> from various distros? I think it might be useful to be able to grep
> around to see what features are actually enabled by which distros.
>
> Based on the domain name, I hoped linuxconfig.org would be such a place,
> if so I cannot find it.
>
> If no such collection exists, do others agree it might be useful? If so,
> I'll be happy to throw up a repo somewhere and start collecting them.

I've looked for this in the past and couldn't find any, and I think this
would be very valuable, but it also sounds like a lot of work for you
to maintain.

Another thing we had discussed previously would be to check in
distro configs into the kernel itself in some form and have the distros
only maintain the diff that they would like to apply on top, in form
of a config fragment.

     Arnd

Re: RFC: collection of common distro configs?

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 12:26:54PM +0200, Rasmus Villemoes wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Does anybody know of a place where one can find a collection of .configs
> from various distros? I think it might be useful to be able to grep
> around to see what features are actually enabled by which distros.
> 
> Based on the domain name, I hoped linuxconfig.org would be such a place,
> if so I cannot find it.
> 
> If no such collection exists, do others agree it might be useful? If so,
> I'll be happy to throw up a repo somewhere and start collecting them.

It will change on a monthly basis, is this really all that useful?  Who
will keep it up to date?

What are you trying to determine?

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: RFC: collection of common distro configs?

[Rasmus Villemoes]

On 29/04/2021 13.22, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 12:26:54PM +0200, Rasmus Villemoes wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> Does anybody know of a place where one can find a collection of .configs
>> from various distros? I think it might be useful to be able to grep
>> around to see what features are actually enabled by which distros.
>>
>> Based on the domain name, I hoped linuxconfig.org would be such a place,
>> if so I cannot find it.
>>
>> If no such collection exists, do others agree it might be useful? If so,
>> I'll be happy to throw up a repo somewhere and start collecting them.
> 
> It will change on a monthly basis, is this really all that useful?  Who
> will keep it up to date?
> 
> What are you trying to determine?

Concretely, I wanted to know if any distro has CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH
set to something other than the empty string (if they have
CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER at all). There are some in-tree _defconfigs with
that, but that doesn't say a whole lot, nobody knows if anybody use
those defconfigs.

But it's something I've wanted to use on other occasions before, and I
see from Arnd's reply that I'm not alone.

It's not about which distros enable some random rtc driver - it's for
the more generic, high-level config options it would be useful. Stack
protector and other hardening things. Is tracing enabled? How about
dynamic_debug, anybody (not) using that? Or legacy config options, can
we remove CONFIG_USELIB and be done with it?

For the same reason, I wouldn't need a new copy of /boot/config-`uname
-r` every time a distro updates to the next -stable tag, the configs are
very likely to be the same for all practical purposes.

As for maintaining it: I'm not going to actively hunt down .configs from
various distros - if that was easy, I wouldn't have asked here in the
first place. I was hoping for crowd-sourcing it; create a github repo
with a README laying out the directory structure and hope kernel devs
would send me the .config they have on their machine in the form of a PR
(or just an email with the info I'd need). It's very likely I'm naive.
But at least I'm not alone in wishing such a thing existed.

Rasmus