Quote of the week [LWN.net]

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 12, 2006 19:11 UTC (Thu) by net_bh (guest, #28735)
In reply to: Quote of the week by william.waddington
Parent article: Quote of the week

>The niche is small, and the drivers of interest only to us and a small group >of users and OEMs. The chance of main line inclusion is zero (or maybe a >large negative number) due to niche size, and probably coding style...

For this reason alone, please read Greg-KH's OLS keynote @ http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html
Somewhere in the middle he talks about exactly your case and why it is still beneficial to push your code in-tree.

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Quote of the week

Posted Oct 13, 2006 14:13 UTC (Fri) by william.waddington (subscriber, #25316) [Link]

"For this reason alone, please read Greg-KH's OLS keynote @ http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html
Somewhere in the middle he talks about exactly your case and why it is still "beneficial to push your code in-tree."

You mean that pushing my code in tree would improve my coding style? No doubt :) Seriously, I'm familiar with Mr. KH's presentation, and I don't really disagree, at least for new driver development.

Even so, there are things about the code that would make pushing in-line a real ordeal: coding style, plethora of ioctls, and DMA directly to/from user buffers, among others. The coding style is fixable, and there are probably "better" ways to handle the API, but "fixing" the API would require abandoning the read/write/ioctl interface we have kept consistent for multiple unixen for 15 years - which seems to be working well for our OEMs and end users.