Hi,
Jean and I have been discussing with Linus about why he won't accept our
patches for Linux-2.4. Basically hi won't apply the patches because they are
large and ugly ;-) but Russell King has already shown that small well documented
high quality IrDA patches will not make it into the kernel either. I guess Linus has
something against IrDA (even if Transmeta is a member of IrDA these days). Now
he's talking crap like us having to study the art of submitting patches so they
will eventually get accepted by him (since his packet loss is so high)
Who wins the fight between Linus and God?
Trick question! Linus _is_ God!
Coding for Linux-IrDA is something I do because it's fun, and being flamed by
Linus is not my idea of having fun. What a way to treat people helping for
free. Makes me want to switch to FreeBSD since they at least have their elected
core team of kernel developers who decide on such issues. But I probably don't
have time to port the stack to FreeBSD, and since I don't have much time for
Linux-IrDA anymore either (not full time anyway), I want to make sure all the
unpaid time I use for Linux development is 100% fun! If not I'll do something else.
I'm not saying that Linus should accept every patch, but I'm not
so impressed with his skills as a manager. One thing is for sure: I don't have time
to split our current 300K patch into smaller patches with higher acceptance factor.
It should be good enough, that the maintainer of the IrDA subsystem has blessed
the current patch (at least when it doesn't touch any other files than those in the
irda directories of the kernel, and when everybody knows that the current
irda code in 2.4 isn't working anyway).
I think we would be better off maintaining the stuff ourselves, and the advantages
for being inside the kernel distribution are very small. We end up getting
our patches rejected, and we cannot fix a bug right away because we have to wait
for the next kernel-release (and then we cannot be sure the patch have been
accepted, and kernels are released where the IrDA subsystem doesn't work). I
remember somebody saying that it was more fun in the old days of Linux-IrDA
(before we got into the kernel distribution), and I feel the same thing myself. If such
a thing happened then we will go back to do the same thing as with PCMCIA
(before 2.4). People will have to download Linux-IrDA and do a "make
install" (modules only), but distributions like Mandrake etc should/would have it
pre-compiled and pre-installed. Should not make things much more difficult for
distributions, since the irda-utils would always match the modules inside the
package. And at least PCMCIA used to work back then ;-)
So should we make our own Linux-IrDA package, or should we stay within the
kernel distribution? Currently we don't need any modifications within the Linux
kernel itself.
Any comments?
-- Dag
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