Kernel configuration for distributions

>While I support this completely, I also think a lot of pain in configuring a kernel would be relieved by providing more user-centric information in the help text.

As someone who spends a lot of free time testing mainline -rc and -next kernels, I totally and absolutely agree - and maybe for kernel maintainers of specific kernel features and modules to check from time to time that their help text is up-to-date - obsolete documentation has caught me out more than once, and not only wasn't I knowledgeable enough about those features/modules to provide an update patch, I didn't even know where to start looking :-/

Tips like make localmodconfig are really useful, but only go so far, and the trial-and-error approach of squeezing a kernel down gets old *really* quickly. But it has to be done; if simply building a new kernel takes a lot longer with a bloated distro config, imagine how much worse this is when you encounter a bug and have to do a bisect...and all those extra new and sometimes arcane features disappearing and popping up again as you whang back and forth from one kernel version to another...

The last time I had to pare down a distro kernel for a new test setup it took me more than *two weeks* to come up with something that was minimal enough to be efficient and still worked, and even then I had delayed starting it until I had a long weekend because I knew it was going to be such a PITA.

Some of this can be put down to naivety and lack of time, but I'll bet that's the case with a lot of testers - we're not developers and are doing this in our spare hours, after all.

>I have a text file that I've slowly filled...

Like the others say, it would be great if this could somehow be available to the rest of us...possibly at kernelnewbies?