[OpenWrt-Devel] Config.in: why the occasional use of "select" instead of "depends"?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  more of my annoying pedantry surfacing, but i'm puzzled as to the
occasional use of "select" in some Config.in files. case in point --
this in "toolchain/eglibc/config/Config.in":

... snip ...
config EGLIBC_OPTION_EGLIBC_CRYPT
        bool "Encryption library"
        default y
        help
          This option group includes the `libcrypt' library which
          provides functions for one-way encryption.  Supported
          encryption algorithms include MD5, SHA-256, SHA-512 and DES.


config EGLIBC_OPTION_EGLIBC_CRYPT_UFC
        bool "Ultra fast `crypt' implementation"
        default y
        select EGLIBC_OPTION_EGLIBC_CRYPT
... snip ...

  assuming there are no other references to those two Config.in
variables, the above strikes me as just awkward and unnecessarily
obtuse.

  rather than the second one "select"ing the first one, why doesn't it
just "depend" on the first one? first, would that not be entirely
equivalent?

  more importantly, using "select" produces a potentially confusing
menuconfig session, where both options are visible, but
selecting/deselecting the second one magically changes the visual
appearance of the first.

  once upon a time, there was a discussion on LKML regarding how many
people really, really despised the arbitrary use of "select" in config
files, because it produced magical side effects that reached across
the kernel source and screwed around with other submenus.

  so, serious question, why select above and not depends?

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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