building from kernel source rpm

[Greg Woods]

On Wed, 2012-11-28 at 13:10 -0800, Joe Zeff wrote:

> What would be nice would be something like the traditional ./configure 
> that didn't just examine the build environment, but probed the hardware 
> and included the drivers you needed and only those.  There would also be 
> (I hope) a way to specify extra drivers, such as for a camera that's not 
> always hooked up

In "those days", hot-plugged devices were rare. Now they are common. It
is a rare user indeed that doesn't have SOME device that isn't always
plugged in but does get used regularly. I don't think that very many
people these days would be able to use a "only compile for the currently
active devices" as a reasonable default. Maybe if you have a REALLY old
(pre-USB) system, but there are very few of those left in the hands of
non-geeks, I'll wager.

The truth is, it's really no big deal to have modules around that never
get loaded, and then if I do obtain a device later that uses them, they
get loaded and just work, and it won't be necessary for me to know which
module I need for my new hardware and/or recompile the kernel every time
I want to plug in a new device.

All that said, I can imagine some corner cases (e.g. developers who are
compiling the kernel every other day on relatively slow hardware) where
it might make sense to take the time to remove unused modules from the
compilation. But otherwise, it seems like it takes more time to
configure the unused modules out than it does to just wait for them to
compile. But whatever floats your boat...

--Greg