On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 2:12 PM, Paul Bolle <pebolle@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 2015-04-09 at 19:07 +0200, Greg KH wrote: >> I really don't understand. Why is this code in the kernel tree if it >> can't be built? How does anyone use this? By taking it and copying it >> where? If it can't be built, and no one can update it, and of course >> not run it, why is it here? What good is this code doing sitting here? > > The Erlangen bot (courtesy of Valentin, Stefan, and Andreas) has taken > over what I've been doing for quite some time, but doing it much more > thoroughly. And my experience tells me that the reports they'll send in > will trigger more discussions like this one. > > A lesson I learned from my daily checks for Kconfig oddities is that > people go to great lengths defending unbuildable code. (Do a web search > for ATHEROS_AR231X to find a discussion that dragged on for over three > years!) Personally I stopped caring after someone insisted on having a > file in the tree that was in no way connected to the build system: not a > single line in any of the Makefiles pointed at it. So, as far as I'm > concerned, if people can't point at a patch pending, somehow, somewhere, > that would make their code buildable one might as well delete the code. > > I really think it's as simple as that. > In the example you reference, sure it is as simple as that. But here we are not talking about files that aren't even referenced by build system. We are talking about a driver which does build and run on upstream kernel, and which has a few small #ifdef blocks to simplify backporting to downstream kernels (which we still do need to use for some generations and some devices) Sure, I'd love never to have to deal with a downstream kernel. But really.. I didn't create the downstream mess in the arm/android ecosystem, I'm just trying to cope with it as best as possible.. don't hate the player, hate the game :-P BR, -R > > Paul Bolle > _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
