Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:38:42 +0200 (CEST) | From | Jiri Kosina <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH, RFC] A development process document |
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On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, Roland Dreier wrote:
> I think Linus has said pretty explicitly that he is willing to merge new > low-level hardware drivers at pretty much any stage, as long as they are > obviously self-contained and can't break anything.
Well, I think I understand a little bit this fear of merging new driver that "obviously can't break anything" in arbitrary stage od development. See below.
> As an example of this, the UVC webcam driver was one of the very last > things merged just before the final 2.6.26 release, very late in the > release cycle.
If you have a hardware that hasn't been supported by the previous kernel versions at all, then everything is fine, just no driver is bound to the device, and the device doesn't work. If then -rc9 comes with a shiny new driver for this hardware, it gets autoloaded. If it is buggy, your system crashes. This is regression, right?
Nevertheless, I still think that merging new drivers as fast as possible is a good thing (tm).
Thanks,
-- Jiri Kosina SUSE Labs
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