[coreboot] an example of bad magic.

[ron minnich]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 3:37 PM, Joe <joe at settoplinux.org> wrote:
> I saw a demonstration of infiniband at one of the Linuxworld expos, and it
> just seemed over all far too complicated than it needed to be. That's my 2
> cents.

sorry if I implied this was any kind of infiniband issue. It's not.
It's a larger issue. The point is that libtool is 7300+ lines of
impenetrable shell script, aimed at 'isolating' users from variations
in systems. But by being so complicated, it merely replaces a small
amount of complexity -- requiring users in some cases to set LIB= --
by a huge amount of complexity. It's an example of what can go wrong
when people set out to make life easier with magic.

I'm a bit concerned at recent posts, because there is some flavor of
this confusing magic in v2, and i don't want to see it come in again
in v3. For example, I think it's ok to have (e.g.) 71 lines of code in
stage1.c for the artec, if that saves us huge amounts of complexity in
the dts spec, the dtc compiler, and the device tree code. Sometimes it
is ok to expose a small amount of complexity if it avoids a huge
amount of hidden complexity. Other times, of course, if we can come up
with good design that removes complexity completely, that's a good
thing.

that's not to say that getting rid of that 71 lines is not a bad idea;
but it *might become* a bad idea if it results in 710 lines of really
obscure code.

Thanks

ron