Kernel build problem

[Richard Harke <rharke@earthlink.net>]

I needed change a USB parameter to allow long time out.
Unfortunatly, USB was built into the kernel so I needed to
rebuild th kernel, not a module. I did

make clean
make menuconfig
   I was careful to just change the one parameter (I gues I could have changed
       USB to module but didn't)
make dep
make

all was fine until

gcc -D__KERNEL__ -I/usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.19-ia64/include -Wall 
-Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common
-fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -ffixed-range=f10-f15,f32-f127 -falign-functions=32
-frename-registers --param max-inline-insns=5000 -mconstant-gp -nostdinc
-I /usr/lib/gcc-lib/ia64-linux/3.3.2/include -DKBUILD_BASENAME=ide-cd
-c -o ide-cd.o ide-cd.c
ide-cd.h:440 error: long, short, signed or unsigned used invalidly for
                               `slot_tablelen`

the line in question is:

         __u8 short slot_tablelen;

ide-cd.h ressides in drivers/ide and has the current date and time
so I guess it was touched (or more) by the make menuconfig
or make dep

I'm tempted to just delete the 'short' and retry but I also would
like understanding.

Richard Harke