defining the available (network) device hardware types

[Robert P. J. Day]

  sort of related to the ongoing discussion of what should and should
not be supported in terms of networking functionality, at the top of
networking/interface.c, you see the hardcoding of things like protocol
families and device types:

...
/*
 *
 * Protocol Families.
 *
 */
#define HAVE_AFINET 1
#undef HAVE_AFIPX
#undef HAVE_AFATALK
#undef HAVE_AFNETROM
#undef HAVE_AFX25
#undef HAVE_AFECONET
#undef HAVE_AFASH

/*
 *
 * Device Hardware types.
 *
 */
#define HAVE_HWETHER    1
#define HAVE_HWPPP      1
#undef HAVE_HWSLIP
...

  now, regardless of whether or not you want to support IPX, or X.25,
or PPP, or SLIP (oh, barf), shouldn't all of this stuff be selectable
options during the configuration?  as an extreme example, you have to
scroll down to line 1530 of interface.c to realize that there's a
macro which (apparently) relates to token ring support:

#if HAVE_HWTR
        &tr_hwtype,

but there's no hint anywhere else in the source tree of anything
related to token ring.  (at least, none that i could see.)

  in any event, i imagine a good cleaning would resolve most of these
issues.

rday