On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 12:08:38PM -0700, Bob Copeland wrote: > On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Luis R. > Rodriguez<lrodriguez@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Well so to group all of Intel stuff we do need this, at least I can't > > think of a way to do it. If we don't want to group intel stuff then we > > can remove it. Is there a downside to this grouping, for example? > > One (admittedly hand-wavy) argument against vendor grouping is that you > don't always know who made the chip. So you have CompanyA buying CompanyB's > IP, making a product, and then we write a driver for CompanyA's device > called awifi2000. Meanwhile CompanyB sells it to CompanyC too so their > "C Wifi Plus" product happens to work with the awifi2000 driver. Now you > have to reorg the menus to put it under CompanyB. > > I imagine this is a lot less likely with wireless, if you know enough to > write a driver, you usually know who made it. But ISTR it happened a lot > with v4l stuff since there are more commodity parts on those cards. Right, good point. This happend with Intersil stuff, which was bought by Globespan Virata, who then quickly sold it to Conexant, and then Conexant seems to have sold off some stuff to STEricson. What I did in this case was just label this as: "Intersil / Conexant / STEricsson" Now granted Globespan also was part of this tree but I'm not aware of them doing anything with the IP except selling it. I expect developers, distribution developers, and users to configure the kernel. So I already do expect at least some familiarity with your hardware and configuring your kernel. "IP" tends to get rebranded on products, the old "prism" named seemed to vanish in later products, for example, but as you indicated we kept the tradition in the old prism54 driver name and labelled the Conexant based devices as p54. I can't think of any other way to group this stuff to help developers, distributions and users than by grouping by manufacturer. Novice users could just boot a distro kernel and run 'make localmodconfig' [1] and find out what they really had, so I see the group'ing part more of a logical aid for those maintaining the drivers and the tree. But again, just my take on it. [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/347611/ Luis -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
