On Sunday 09 Oct 2005 19:06, Hans Verkuil wrote: > 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 > Hi Hans
If the files are going to be merged will those modules in future only be available from the v4l site. It sounds like this may mean that unless you running the latest bleeding edge kernel it will not be possible to run the latest copy of ivtv. The only way around this I can think of is taking a snapshot of the v4l modules now and in future take snapshots and tweak the code to allow the code to still build. Then when the "tweaks" become to cumbersome jump to a new ivtv version that only builds using kernel x.x.x and later. Best Regards Trev _______________________________________________ ivtv-devel mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-devel
