Hi,
On 18-01-17 13:10, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 5:18 AM, Hans de Goede <hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
On 17-01-17 21:59, Laura Abbott wrote:
On 01/17/2017 05:19 AM, Hans de Goede wrote:
Hi,
On 17-01-17 14:12, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
Lo! Three quick question from someone who for some strange reason is
interested in this topic:
Hans de Goede wrote on 17.01.2017 13:11:
As such I would like to (for starters) add this driver:
https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs
Which is fully open source and although not ready for
upstream, actively maintained by the community, to the
driver/staging directory of the Fedora kernel pkg.
* wouldn't it make more sense to simply add the driver to the staging
directory upstream?
See my answer to Bastien's mail.
* will users somehow made aware they are using drivers of lower quality
which are maintained differently (they for example might vanish suddenly
if maintainers lose interest, which normally doesn't happen with proper
kernel drivers)
Other then the standard tainting caused by this being in staging, no.
* while at it: Is https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KernelStagingPolicy
still considered policy or is it a page everyone forgot about?
I for one had never heard about that page.
Regards,
Hans
Yes, that page should still be accurate wrt to staging policy although
I think the list of drivers might need to be updated.
In general, I think upstreaming is the right approach to take and
if you are willing to go through staging, I think that could be
a good path to work to get the driver out of staging.
I've the feeling this whole discussion has been derailed a bit
by focusing too much on the rtl8723bs example.
Quoting from my original mail, upstreaming was given as
one possible solution:
"d) Get the driver upstreamed. Unfortunately many of
these drivers are vendor code, which often is ported
windows code with lots of ugly glue; and the effort to
get this upstream will take more time then I have
to invest into this. Also if this were easy it would
have been done by now, there are quite a few people
interested in this."
Nothing has changed wrt this, to be specific I would like
to see the following wifi drivers be available in Fedora
kernels:
rtl8723bs
rtl8189es
rtl8189fs
esp8089
xradio
And in the future possible others (rda599x comes to mind)
and I simply do not have the bandwidth to get 1 one of
these let alone all of these into staging, let alone
fully mainlined.
Currently we're crippling our user experience by refusing
to ship drivers support this hardware even though there are
fully open drivers to support these.
Hans, I think you need to take a deep breath. You seem to have come
to this discussion with fully loaded guns blazing.
Nobody has refused your request. There's been a discussion about the
best way to get it upstream. Nobody has said no.
Also, I understand your argumentation about user experience but this
is the first I've heard of this issue and I couldn't find any reports
of this in bugzilla. While it isn't relevant to the decision to add
the drivers, I do wonder how many users we have of such hardware. It
seems we aren't crippling user experience as much as we would be
making it possible to use the hardware in the first place. That could
certainly be a good thing.
Again quoting from my original email:
"I also believe that this rule goes against Fedora's
basic principles:
-It goes against the First principle, many other distros
are shipping with this driver
-It goes against the Features principle, disallowing
people to have working wifi is a mis-Feature
-It goes against the Freedom principle, if a contributor
is willing to spend time to maintain such a driver
he/she should have the freedom to do so"
Principles are good to have and provide guidance on how one should act
when possible. Sometimes they're out-weighed by reality though. I
mean, if we were to take them literally for every single issue, we'd
be supporting armv5, armv6, sparc, mips, mips64, etc etc. That's not
hyperbole either. Users have requested all of those. The team simply
doesn't have the resources to do them all. I know you know this, so
throwing principles in the Fedora kernel team's face seems a little
preachy just for the sake of getting what you want.
Heh, I actually mentioned them because I was afraid that the principle
of upstream first was getting in the way of the reality being that
sometimes drivers are hard to upstream, yet users still need them.
I've always liked Fedora for its pragmatic approach to things,
e.g. see how we deal with wifi firmware vs how Debian does.
And I still end up at my original unanswered question:
"All I'm asking from the fedora kernel team is permission
to add the driver."
I believe you also offered to maintain it, yes?
Yes, if I get to go ahead to add these I will take care of them
100%, which is also why I want to start with just rtl8723bs and
see how that goes.
As said the Fedora kernel team can just comment out the patches
when things break when rebasing to a new rc1, and I will take
care of getting things fixed. Note if things break in a minor
release e.g. going from 4.8.15 to 4.8.16 a heads-up of course
would be appreciated, but I assume that is common sense.
Regards,
Hans
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