It's same as with Reiser4 [LWN.net]

It's same as with Reiser4

Posted Nov 14, 2008 23:25 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: It's same as with Reiser4 by khim
Parent article: The sad story of the em28xx driver

If I follow your analogy, you're saying that it would be bad to include Markus's new driver alongside the existing one because Markus would eventually abandon it in favor of working on yet another new driver.

Is it actually a requirement for driver inclusion that future support be lined up? That seems to be the opposite of the open source process. Rather, a developer puts code into the mainline so that the whole rest of the world can maintain it. In particular, users of the code — people with a material interest in it — maintain it. If the code doesn't get maintained and becomes unusable, we just drop it back out.

The article mentions the confusion factor of having two similar drivers. I can think of another drawback: division of development and test effort. All of these are weak.

Mauro doesn't explain his reason for not wanting both. He just says:

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.

That's non sequitur to me.

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It's same as with Reiser4

Posted Nov 14, 2008 23:32 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

I read it not as an analogy, but as another example of a developer who had trouble working with people and therefor had trouble getting code merged.

there have been many examples of alternate drivers for hardwar being in the kernel, very few of them have worked out well in the long run, so kernel devs don't want to do more of it.

It's same as with Reiser4

Posted Nov 15, 2008 5:30 UTC (Sat) by mrec (guest, #41847) [Link]

It's not about a developer having problem to work together with people.
It's about that this code has been available for years

http://mcentral.de/hg/~mrec/em28xx-new/shortlog

just check the list of contributors, and the maintainer hard fights against it now. The reason for the big patch has always been that the code had to be rebased because the maintainer basically didn't care about anything there.

Another example

http://linuxtv.org/hg/v4l-dvb/rev/dc22320bb695

I don't see any pull request on the mailinglist, Mauro does it offlist excluding everyone else from it. Ok I acknowledge that is what's wanted and how it should be done.

Markus