Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:33:27 +0200 | From | Stefan Richter <> | Subject | Re: removing existing working drivers via staging |
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david@lang.hm wrote: > I missed this discussion in the thread "Moving drivers into > staging (was Re: [GIT PULL] SCSI fixes for 2.6.32-" and I suspect that > many others did as well > > for those that missed it, as I understand it the proposal is that 'ugly' > (working drivers that don't do things the kernel way and are perceived as > not being commonly used anymore) drivers will get moved into staging, and
There was mention of "abandoned and unused" drivers (rather than "not /commonly/ used anymore"), see e.g. http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-10/msg05204.html (2nd to last paragraph; thread continues with Greg's follow-up).
> if the driver maintainers do not clean them up within 6-9 months they will > be removed entirely. > > the expectation is that if there are no maintainers for the driver who > care enough to do the cleanup they should be removed (with interested > users being able to take over maintaining the drivers if there the > maintainers are MIA) > > I have several reactions to this > > I think that 6-9 months (2-3 releases) is _far_ too short for users to > notice. most users will be using a distro kernel that is on a release > cycle longer than this (even if they are not using a 'enterprise' distro), > so their first inkling of a problem will be the driver disappearing on > them. Yes the driver can be recovered through git, bit at that point > there is going to be catch-up changes to make. > > What happened to the desire that Linux would be able to use anything, and > once a driver was upstream changes to the kernel that would break it > should be fixed by whoever is introducing those changes? This seems to be > moving in the direction of only having drivers for fairly current, fairly > common hardware.
AFAIU, mostly just code which is known to _not work_ anymore or has been functionally replaced by an alternative drops out of the mainline. This idea of using drivers/staging/ in the process is surely not going to change that in principle; it will only raise awareness among active kernel developers better than feature-removal-schedule.txt can do. -- Stefan Richter -=====-==--= =-=- -==== http://arcgraph.de/sr/
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