Re: [PATCH] hwmon/sensors: fix SENSORS_LM75 dependencies

From: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
To: Jean Delvare <khali@linux-fr.org>
Cc: Eduardo Valentin <eduardo.valentin@ti.com>,
	"Zhang, Rui" <rui.zhang@intel.com>,
	Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>,
	Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>,
	linux-next@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	lm-sensors@lm-sensors.org, linux-pm@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] hwmon/sensors: fix SENSORS_LM75 dependencies
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2014 08:10:18 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20140107161018.GB24018@roeck-us.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20140107160738.4a76a6d0@endymion.delvare>

On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 04:07:38PM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jan 2014 10:57:52 -0400, Eduardo Valentin wrote:
> > On 07-01-2014 10:05, Zhang, Rui wrote:
> > > BTW, I've been thinking of make CONFIG_THERMAL a bool since long time ago, the only thing that blocks me is that Thermal subsystem needs to register a hwmon device for each thermal zone and CONFIG_HWMON is a tristate.
> > 
> > I agree with the move of having CONFIG_THERMAL as bool. Unless you have
> > use cases where users are dynamically loading and unloading thermal per
> > user demand, which I doubt.
> 
> Modularity is not only about reloading modules (although this can be
> useful for developers in particular.) It's also about enabling many
> features in a generic distribution kernel and each feature only gets
> loaded/used on the hardware which needs it. This is why, as a
> distribution kernel maintainer, I keep complaining when I see boolean
> options which might easily be tristates.
> 
Agreed. Problem is really that it is not easy to declare cross-module
dependencies (eg THERMAL=m -> HWMON=m and THERMAL=y -> HWMON=y and
vice versa) in Kconfig. Declaring everything as bool can not be
the solution to that.

Guenter