Quote of the week

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 12, 2006 14:29 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Quote of the week by ebiederm
Parent article: Quote of the week

No; it's not mergeable because it is structurally considerably different from the HolyWayOfLinux, and to make it AcceptableForMerging would strip away most of the reasons for using it (rich userspace configuration API), not to mention a great deal of work for little apparent gain.

Meanwhile, I don't think the kernel people go out of their way to make out-of-tree drivers difficult to maintain ("don't care one way or another" is a good way of putting it), but dismissing all out-of-tree drivers as somehow inferior, unsuitable for use, or "self-flagellating at best" is grossly unfair, for the precise reasons that Linus mentioned:

> it's the damn drivers maintained outside the tree, and
> people who want to maintain the same driver for multiple different
> versions of the kernel.

If your driver needs to support multiple kernel versions, then you need to maintain it out of tree, whether or not there is an in-tree variant to keep track of as well.

While there is an extensive compatibility header already in place, there are still many bits and pieces littered all over the codebase for things that are simply incompatible. Even within the 2.6-series, for example, pcmcia changed radically for both 2.6.16 and 2.6.17.

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