On 4/10/2024 10:56 AM, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
On Wed, 10 Apr 2024 10:39:11 -0700 Florian Fainelli wrote:
Hm, we currently group by vendor but the fact it's a private device
is probably more important indeed. For example if Google submits
a driver for a private device it may be confusing what's public
cloud (which I think/hope GVE is) and what's fully private.
So we could categorize by the characteristic rather than vendor:
drivers/net/ethernet/${term}/fbnic/
I'm afraid it may be hard for us to agree on an accurate term, tho.
"Unused" sounds.. odd, we don't keep unused code, "private"
sounds like we granted someone special right not took some away,
maybe "exclusive"? Or "besteffort"? Or "staging" :D IDK.
Do we really need that categorization at the directory/filesystem level?
cannot we just document it clearly in the Kconfig help text and under
Documentation/networking/?
From the reviewer perspective I think we will just remember.
If some newcomer tries to do refactoring they may benefit from seeing
this is a special device and more help is offered. Dunno if a newcomer
would look at the right docs.
Whether it's more "paperwork" than we'll actually gain, I have no idea.
I may not be the best person to comment.
To me it is starting to feel like more paperwork than warranted,
although I cannot really think about an "implied" metric that we could
track, short of monitoring patches/bug reports coming from outside of
the original driver authors/owners as an indication of how widely
utilized a given driver is.
The number of changes to the driver between release cycles is not a good
indication between a driver with few users presents the most agile
configuration, but similarly, a very actively used driver with real
world users may see a large number of changes between releases based
upon its use.
What we need is some sort of popularity contest tracking :)
--
Florian
