Quoting "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@xxxxxxxxx>:
Question then is -- are we willing to require spatch for building the
tarballs? I'm OK with this, anyone else?
Good question! I think it may be worth it, but let's consider the arguments.
Against:
coccinelle is not nearly as widespread as other required tools (gcc,
make, patch).
coccinelle depends on ocaml. That's a whole programming language that
many systems (including my home system with Fedora 15) don't have
installed by default, even if the "development" was selected at the
system install.
I don't know the status of coccinelle and ocaml packaging on various
distros. Asking users to compile both to have the latest wireless
drivers is pretty cruel.
Even Fedora 15, as I found out while writing this message, mispackages
coccinelle. The dependency on ocaml-findlib is missing, so coccinelle
is not functional when installed by yum. I'm going to report is as
soon as possible.
There are two names, spatch and coccinelle. That's going to be
confusing for the users. They won't know which package to look for.
Some will look for both.
For:
There is no need to have any special variant of coccinelle to
cross-compile compat-wireless.
Popularization of coccinelle and ocaml may be a good thing. More
users means more eyeballs looking for bugs.
Patches will become more clear, at least for those knowing the basics
of coccinelle syntax. Non-trivial changes won't be buried in trivial
ones.
compat-wireless will be more robust.
It may be possible to port compat-wireless to more kernels. Or maybe
more subsystems will be backported. Replacing even large amounts of
code would become easier.
While some people can be inconvenienced by the need to install
coccinelle, it's a solvable problem for most users. On the other
hand, backporting compat-wireless to older kernels or backporting more
features is something that very few people can do, and those people
should not be bothered with trivial stuff too much.
My experience shows that placing too much boring stuff on the
shoulders of the developers is detrimental to the users in the long
run. It's one thing to require extensive testing, which can be
automated, or to require compatibility with older tools, which can be
easily achieved. On the other hand, requiring to update huge patches
manually is boring and error prone. Make the developers busy with
boring stuff, and they will stop making improvements that nobody else
can do.
--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin
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