On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 20:54 +0000, James Bottomley wrote: > On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 08:58 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > > On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, James Bottomley wrote: > > > > > > This is mostly fixes. However, it contains two new drivers: Brocade SAS > > > (bfa), the Bladengine2 iSCSI (be2iscsi) under the merge window exemption > > > > Btw, I'm getting less excited about the merge window exemption. > > > > It makes sense for consumer devices that people actually hit and that are > > needed for bringup (ie they make a difference between a system that can be > > installed and used, and one that cannot), but I'm not at all sure it makes > > sense for things like this. > > > > The _reason_ for the driver exemption was the fact that even a broken > > driver is better than no driver at all for somebody who just can't get a > > working system without it, but that argument really goes away when the > > driver is so specialized that it's not about regular hardware any more. > > OK, so I don't see a huge distinction here. This is a driver for a > piece of enterprise HW that Linux previously didn't support. To someone > cursing not being able to use there hardware, it's every bit as > important as the latest wireless driver. > > > And the whole "driver exemption" seems to have become a by-word for "I can > > ignore the merge window for 50% of my code". Which makes me very tired of > > it if there aren't real advantages to real users. > > While the exemption exists, I can certainly ignore the merge window for > new drivers, yes ... however, that's not 50% of the code submitted in > the merge window, and it's one time ... the same driver follows the > merge window for the next release. I try to police this pretty rigidly > in SCSI ... as you do at the top. > > In fact, for SCSI, these two drivers are the third and fourth merge > window exemptions in our year long history of allowing this. > > > So I'm seriously considering a "the driver has to be mass market and also > > actually matter to an install" rule for the exemption to be valid. > > OK, so on the policy, let me argue against the above. One of the things > we've been saying about linux is that we facilitate rapid adoption of > new hardware (and that we support more hardware than any other OS). The > Merge window exemption was adopted at the kernel summit last year > specifically to speed our adoption of new hardware. I think it's > valuable for this speed of adoption to be *all* hardware, not > specifically mass market laptop type stuff. > > However, even if you want to change the definition, can we please not do > it retroactively? So what do you want to do about this? I need the fixes in this tree to go forwards even if you don't want the new drivers ... I also now have a list of other fixes to put in the next round which I'd like to get into linux-next but while this is unresolved I can't really add more stuff to my rc-fixes tree. James -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
