Quotes of the week

Al Viro has managed to get his and his wife's paperwork in order, and has returned to USA. Apparently, there was no record of his having been discharged from the Soviet Army. The authorities also lacked any record of his wife having an address in Russia while an adult. This situation was reportedly resolved as only Al Viro could have resolved it.

Reports of its demise were greatly exaggerated. But it's going to be a few days before we're back in sync with "current time" - I wanted to get the retrospective episodes on the merge window done, even though it's "old" now because the merge window period is of high value. I've been doing about 3 hours a night over the past few days to get through it. I view it as some kind of oddly exciting psychological masochism.

gad. You said "floppy" and "ioctl" in the same sentence. Where angels fear to tread.

The _reason_ for the driver exemption was the fact that even a broken driver is better than no driver at all for somebody who just can't get a working system without it, but that argument really goes away when the driver is so specialized that it's not about regular hardware any more.

And the whole "driver exemption" seems to have become a by-word for "I can ignore the merge window for 50% of my code". Which makes me very tired of it if there aren't real advantages to real users. So I'm seriously considering a "the driver has to be mass market and also actually matter to an install" rule for the exemption to be valid.

Checkpatch is not very bright, it has no understanding of style beyond playing with pattern regexps. It's a rather dim tool that helps people get work done... or as some would have it a rather dim tool used by even dimmer tools to make noise on kernel list.