On Thu, Nov 09, 2000 at 10:33:39AM +0000, Dag Brattli wrote:
> 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)
>
Hm thats pitty, because a lot of people like your works. I dont know
what Linus has against IRDA, so I was a little bit upset as he claimed
in an interview the in german computer magzine C't, that you can not use
your cellphones and laptops together right now with linux, but
some where in the future.
> 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
>
I think, when linus dont like irda in the kernel, it should stay in its own
distribution. Maybe in the near future Linus will see that he was wrong to
blame you and dont inclued irda in the official kernel,
because connecting laptops via irda with cellphones will become a big
market in the next 5 years. Especially in europe with the new technik of utms,
which provides more bandwidth and cheaper connetcions to the internet.
--
Henning Heinold
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