On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 04:32:15PM +0300, Igor Stoppa wrote: > > What I consider plain wrong i to claim that since there are this > many units out, some code should be merged. > A company needs to cut corners sometimes when making a product but > this should not affect upstream code. Linus will disagree with you there. Linus *has* merged code on the basis that it is shipping in distributions, regardless of the fact that some developers objected to it. Sometimes "perfect" should not be the enemy of "good enough" shipping code. For example, I used to point out that we shipped PCMCIA code in mainline that had a 10% chance of crashing the system if you ejected the card. NetBSD was proud to say that their code was so iron-clad and well designed that it always did the right thing, even if you ejected while it was busily passing network traffic. Unfortunately, NetBSD had working PCMCIA support 3 years later than Linux. So it used to be that we were the technical pragmatists (and Linus fortunately, still very much is the pragmatists, while others were the hard-line perfectionists. It seems to me we've started getting some of the NetBSD attitude infecting LKML, and IMHO, that's unfortunate. We've rewritten our networking stack, 3 or 4 times, depending on how you count. And sometimes shipping in products counts for a lot. It doesn't count for everything, and it isn't a get-out-of-jail card, for sure. But if it's a hard problem, and we have something that's good enough, maybe the right call is to merge it now, and we'll rework things to make something better and more general later. Ultimately that's a call only Linus can make. If everyone agrees we're making progress, and we can let this 100+ mail thread keep going. But if anyone feels that we are spinning endlessly without making forward progress (which is after all the same criteria the OOM killer uses, no? :-), people should remember that sometimes Linus *has* ended arguments that have gone on too long by making a "merge or kill" decision. - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
