> I'm fine with applying patches 2-5, but I am definitely interested to > hear what others think about this. Clearly, LOC is reduced, but that's > not the only factor in code maintenance. I think it will be a nightmare for maintenance with all the includes and the like plus the ifdefs making it very hard to read the drivers and maintain them. Some of it could be cleanly split. The 40wire lists for example could all be merged into one with a function taking the pci_dev of the controller which did a lookup based on vendor/dev/svid/sdid. That would put them all in one logical clean C file and makes sense as a split point for the code. > En masse backporting bug fixes is what's known as a one-time cost. Once > the majority of libata PATA drivers reach bugfix and feature parity, the > need for code sharing is reduced greatly. One problem is telling which of the bits in the old IDE stack are - bug fixes - bugs - cargo culting - irrelevant So I think its an extremely useful exercise to figure out what subtle differences there are between the drivers. It's not then a trivial assumption that they can just be pasted over. The include stuff though is too ugly to merge even if its an excellent research project to identify the differences and quirks. The old IDE "maintenance mode" seems to be drifting - the rate of change is rather high for that claim. Alan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
