Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:13:37 +0200 | From | Stefan Richter <> | Subject | Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Request for discussion on when to merge drivers |
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James Bottomley wrote: > On Thu, 2008-06-19 at 09:31 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: >> linux-next should, imho, exclusively be for things we are pretty much >> commited to merge in the next release. ie, a staging place to fixup >> things like build breakages, patch conflicts, etc... >> >> Or else, it will just be another -mm .... > > Well, as Greg said for his driver staging tree, I think we can elide > this requirement for new drivers. The good thing about drivers is that > there's nothing we're really doing to break anything: before the driver > the hardware was just plane unusable with Linux after the driver well, > we're hoping it might be ...
This requires that the staged driver does not contain build bugs on any architecture.
Besides, the definition of what we published in -next so far was:
Everything in -next is *merge-ready* now (from a subsystem maintainer's POV). The only reason that it is not merged yet is that Linus doesn't have a merge window open right now.
And the goal of -next was to check for potential integration problems that cannot be detected in a maintainer's tree.
So IMO the question is not whether to put stuff which is not ready to be merged into -next. It shouldn't, IMO. The questions rather are: - What are criteria for merge-readiness of drivers? (When do we have to / are we able to address issues like CamelCase names or use of obsolete APIs --- before or after merge?) - How to publish drivers which are not yet merge-ready but should get into the hands of testers?
IMO the answer to the latter question is still not -next, because the testing that -next gets is (from what I understood) also with the specific goal to detect potential integration problems. Remember, you publish code in -next of which you can say: This is ready for mainline, except that there is little experience yet WRT potential integration issues. -- Stefan Richter -=====-==--- -==- =--== http://arcgraph.de/sr/
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