Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 2 Mar 2009 23:45:14 -0800 | Subject | Re: Staging, place holder for better company/community development model | From | "Luis R. Rodriguez" <> |
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On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 11:14:56PM -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: >> A lot of people really hate the staging tree. > > They do? I've not gotten any complaints that I can remember about it.
Heh.......
>> I don't but let me tell you why and I'd like to see if you concur with >> these particular concrete use cases and ideas on how to further use >> it. >> >> The ath9k driver came to many as a big surprise -- and since it was a >> surprise we had to do the work ourselves as a team at Atheros in >> closed doors, without the community's involvement until we got >> something standing up and not smelling as bad. Our own change in >> direction to work on things upstream can be seen later as well by the >> release of the 11n Otus driver and documentation provided to >> interested developers to port it to mac80211 (not to mention similar >> type of work for ath5k) -- Johannes quickly then ported it and created >> the ar9170 11n USB driver which is its replacement for otus and >> targeted for wireless-testing. Otus is currently part of the staging >> tree. While ar9170 has no 802.11n support users wishing to test 11n >> USB with an open driver can use the "vendor" driver. The idea is to >> minimize as time goes by the "port" effort and get things out to the >> community faster. >> >> With future devices we may want to create a better path for >> integration into upstream drivers. But I also want users to get >> support for the devices as soon as those devices hit shelves in the >> market, maybe even before. So I would like to think of staging not >> only as a place for people to put drivers which a company has no >> resources to do the right job but also perhaps to _do_ the actual port >> work _with_ the community together. > > This is already happening today, with at least two different network > drivers, so I have no objection to this at all.
Oh nice, which ones and what companies if you can say.
>> By doing so we get devices supported with whatever ugly piece of code >> makes the device run (as long as its open, upstreamble, etc) but we >> also can engage with the community on the actual engineering and >> future of the actual driver we do want to support in Linux. >> >> As time goes by hopefully staging will not be necessary as companies >> (like ours) will have an immediate well defined structure for their >> drivers to easily add support for further devices. > > Sounds fine to me. > >> If we should take this approach -- should we send patches for wireless >> staging to John, or Greg? It would still be "crap" so I don't expect >> John to accept to help maintain crap but what if its crap with a clear >> defined path to un-crap land? > > I'll gladly take them, no objections from me.
Alright nice, will bounce this internally now.
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