On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 07:39:03PM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > But what are these "classes" used for exactly? That was my main
> > question. Does anyone really use them? Can we just delete them
> > altogether?
>
> Aha. I was expecting you to tell us ;) You are the one who introduced
> them in the first place, aren't you? If not, we definitely want to
> contact that person to know what he/she had in mind.
>
> There were no classes concept in our 2.4 drivers, which tends to prove
> that we can possibly live without them. See my previous posts for my
> opinion on the topic.
Ah, in digging through the change log entries I found the following:
ChangeSet 1.1738 2003/05/06 16:41:46 kraxel at bytesex.org
[PATCH] i2c #3/3: add class field to i2c_adapter
This is the last of three patches for i2c. It introduces a new
field to i2c_adapter which classifies the kind of hardware a i2c
adapter belongs to (analog tv card / dvb card / smbus / gfx card
...). i2c chip drivers can use this infomation to decide whenever
they want to look for hardware on that adapter or not. It doesn't
make sense to probe for a tv tuner on a smbus for example ...
So this was a video developer's request. Does that help explain it a
bit more now?
thanks,
greg k-h
