On Friday 20 November 2009 22:06:02 Devin Heitmueller wrote: > On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi Mauro, > > > > Please pull from http://www.linuxtv.org/hg/~hverkuil/v4l-dvb-staging > > for the following: > > > > - Enable staging drivers by default when building v4l-dvb > > - go7007: Add struct v4l2_device. > > - s2250: Change module structure > > - s2250: subdev conversion > > - go7007: subdev conversion > > I have to admit that I am not sure that enabling staging drivers by > default is a good idea. Staging drivers can be highly unstable, and > can potentially damage hardware. I can totally imagine less > experienced users with one of these devices building the current code > and then being confused why their hardware is detected but is totally > broken, or worse becomes damaged. If there are drivers in the staging tree that are so unreliable that they can break the hardware, then those should be explicitly disabled, rather than disabling all drivers in the staging tree. Or perhaps do not belong there at all, or belong under the CONFIG_STAGING_BROKEN option. A driver like the go7007 is under active development, and it does work. It only needs more cleanup before it can be moved to drivers/media/video, so there was no reason that it should be disabled. Mauro, what are the risks of always compiling the tm6000 and cx25821 drivers? Let me know if you think that either one or both should be disabled for now and I'll make a patch for it. > I agree that we should be periodically ensuring the modules still > compile, but I think that by default they should need to be explicitly > enabled by a developer who knows what he/she is doing and understands > the ramifications/risks. By not compiling you run the very high risk of bit rot: code getting seriously out-of-sync with the rest of the tree. Possibly requiring a lot of work later. Our tree is primarily for developers, not for end-users. So we need to see any code breakages as early as possible. In my view all drivers should always be compiled. If the driver is so unreliable that it can break hardware, then it doesn't belong in our repository at all, staging or not. Regards, Hans -- Hans Verkuil - video4linux developer - sponsored by TANDBERG -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
