On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:43:06AM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
> If you want to make this a mandatory path for old drivers, then, I think
> it's far too rigid, yes. There's a huge amount of danger to changing
> working drivers simply on grounds of code cleanup and that danger
> increases exponentially as they get older and the hardware gets rarer.
> Look at what happened to the initio driver in 2008 for instance. That
> was cleaned up by Alan Cox, no mean expert in the field, with the
> assistance of a tester with the actual card, so basically a textbook
> operation. However, a bug crept in during this process that wasn't
> spotted by the tester. When it was spotted (bug report ~6 months later)
> the original tester wasn't available and code inspection across the
> cleanup was very hard. Fortunately, the reporter was motivated to track
> down and patch the driver, so it worked out all right in the end, but a
> lot of bug reporters aren't so capable (or so motivated). Plus most
> clean up patches for old hardware tend only to be compile tested, so the
> potential for bugs is far greater.
I understand the potential for bugs, and am not saying to do this for
all drivers, so it is not mandatory at all.
I have just received a bunch of people asking me if we can use
drivers/staging/ to get stuff that is known broken, or has other
problems (style issues[1]), out into an area where people know it needs
to be fixed up otherwise it will be dropped.
thanks,
greg k-h
[1] No, floppy.c doesn't count, no matter how much people might want it
to :)
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