I've been thinking on how to handle compatibility with older kernels in the
0.5 series. The problem is that to stay backwards compatible requires keeping
the supporting drivers (tuner, tveeprom, saa7115, etc) in the ivtv
distribution. That sort of defeats the purpose of the 0.5 series.
It also makes it hard to continue development: if someone decides to introduce
API changes into something like the tuner module you will have to track that
development in your own copy. This is not feasible in the long run.
I like to propose the following solution: we maintain the 0.4 branch as the
stable branch that works well with all kernels upto 2.6.14 and depending on
future development probably for later kernels too. As long as it is easy to
support a new kernel, well, why not.
The 0.5 and higher series only supports newer kernels, basically starting with
the first kernel that has all supporting modules merged (tveeprom, tuner and
tda9887 are already merged in 2.6.14). Especially the duplicate modules are a
major headache and they really have to go from the ivtv distribution.
So that leaves us with a 0.4 that supports kernels from 2.4 up to 2.6.X and a
0.5/0.6 that supports kernels from 2.6.Y onwards (where Y <= X).
It is similar to, say, the dvb project where they also have a separate
repository for 2.4 kernels.
Obviously, this also means that the 0.4 branch has to be maintained for quite
some time. But that was also true for 0.2 :-)
I feel very strongly that at some point you have to make a new start and this
is a good time to do it.
Comments?
Hans
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