Re: [PATCH 1/7] Adding empia base driver

On Sat, 1 Nov 2008 14:59:17 +0100
Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl> wrote:

> Hi Markus,
> 
> As promised I've done a review of your empia driver and looked at what 
> needs to be done to get it into the kernel.
> 
> First of all, I've no doubt that your empia driver is better and 
> supports more devices than the current em28xx driver. I also have no 
> problem adding your driver separate from the current driver. It's been 
> done before (certain networking drivers spring to mind) and while 
> obviously not ideal I expect that the older em28xx driver can probably 
> be removed after a year or something like that.
> 
> In my opinion it's pretty much hopeless trying to convert the current 
> em28xx driver into what you have. It's a huge amount of work that no 
> one wants to do and (in this case) with very little benefit. Of course, 
> Mauro has the final say in this.
> 

Both upstream and the 4 duplicated drivers have similar functionality. Also,
the upstream driver is actively maintained. So, there's no sense on accepting
those duplicated drivers.

Also, just replacing one existing driver by a newer one will cause regressions
on some already fixed bugs and remove some improvements that the upstream driver
suffered.

If there's a bug or a lack of functionality on em28xx, cx25843, xc5000 or
tuner-xc2028, it is just a matter of submitting patches fixing those bugs or
adding newer features.

Cheers,
Mauro