[RFC] use kconfig for configuration

[lrusak]

This allows tracking the LibreELEC configuration options through kconfig.

For this purpose I have been testing with Kconfiglib. It can be easily installed with pip.

pip3 install kconfiglib

The main reason I wanted to do this was to have a uniform and central location for all configuration options. This allows us to have better help, and dependency tracking for config options. Options will be able to depend on other options instead of having to handle that in shell scripts.

This also allow one to use menuconfig (and other kconfig utilities) to configure the options. This is quite nice.
This can be invoked with

$ PROJECT=RPi ARCH=arm DEVICE=RPi4 make menuconfig

or similar.
I have created a helper script that is also available to call directly (for other kconfig utilities).

$ PROJECT=RPi ARCH=arm DEVICE=RPi4 ./scripts/make_config olddefconfig

Basically all options files are merged into a single file during the build and olddefconfig is used to create a final config file which is then sourced by the shell scripts. This is nice because it tells you if options are wrong or specified multiple times.

I've made this PR just to get some feedback if people like this idea or not. I didn't want to commit a bunch of time to writing a bunch of documentation and changing all the current shell logic to use y instead of yes. I have also (ab)used the use of strings in kconfig when a lot of them should really be booleans. This can be improved if we decide we like this direction.

I've only built for Generic-gbm and RPI4, I haven't tested the other projects/devices.

Projects that use kconfig (of some kind)

• linux
• u-boot
• busybox
• crosstool-ng

some screenshots

Thanks for reading.

[vpeter4]

In my opinion not needed at all.

[lrusak]

In my opinion not needed at all.

Thank you sooooo much for your helpful insight! 👍

[vpeter4]

You asked for a feedback.

What exactly this PR solves and what you are trying to achieve? To be some generic buildsystem? Then why not use some other buildsystem which already supports this feature and much more.

[lrusak]

You asked for a feedback.

What exactly this PR solves and what you are trying to achieve? To be some generic buildsystem? Then why not use some other buildsystem which already supports this feature and much more.

Did you read the OP?

[vpeter4]

Did you read the OP?

I read. And see nothing useful.
Wondering how OE/LE had survived over all this years without this feature ...