Re: [PULL] http://www.linuxtv.org/hg/~hverkuil/v4l-dvb-staging

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Hans Verkuil wrote:
>> Hans Verkuil wrote:
>>> 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.
>> Even on upstream, drivers in staging are not compiled by default. To
>> enable
>> them, you need to answer yes to two questions.
>>
>> If the driver is OK, it shouldn't be in staging. The drivers that are in
>> staging have issues that may be just coding style, can be the usage of
>> wrong
>> API's, or can be something serious.
>>
>> Also, since the criteria for a driver to be in staging are weak, they may
>> not
>> be prepared to be used widely, since they is likely doing some evil
>> things,
>> like duplicating existing code or creating non-accepted API's.
>>
>> In the go7007 case, among other things, the driver duplicates existing
>> code at
>> the saa7115 driver still uses the already deprecated DECODER ioctl's, and
>> creates its own API (see go7007.h).
>>
>> So, I'm against of enabling any staging drivers to be compiled by default.
>>
>> Of course, in the case of auto-compilation tests tools like what you have,
>> it is
>> valuable if you add a patch there that enables their compilations inside
>> the
>> tool, but such patch shouldn't be committed at the development tree,
>> simply
>> because staging drivers aren't ready yet.
>>
>> The developers and testers of the staging drivers should manually enable
>> it,
>> after being warned about the risks of using them.
>>
>>> 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.
>> If the driver is being maintained, this risk is low, since the driver
>> maintainer
>> will take care of it. It helps if your automatic build scripts could point
>> that
>> the driver compilation broke for some kernels, but, as the driver is being
>> prepared
>> for upstream submission, the developer should already being using the
>> latest -rc kernel
>> for its development.
>>
>> If they aren't maintained, they'll be removed from staging tree on a few
>> kernel
>> cycles, so patches fixing the compilation for those unmaintained drivers
>> just
>> means that someone lost his time fixing a dead driver.
> 
> I've reverted that patch and respun my v4l-dvb-staging tree.

Thanks. 

I should be pulling from all pending requests today, after finishing the pending stuff at patchwork.

Cheers,
Mauro.
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