I believe that the work which has been done by Dag and Jean (to mention
but a few) is possibly some of the best "new" and exciting development in
the kernel.
Although in some respects it can be seen as a shame that the kernel source
will not include IrDA as initially finding IrDA in the kernel
configuration options was how I came upon IrDA. I find it quite
frusttrating to see that the *latest* version of IrDA (which was released
before the kernel!) is not included in the kernel.
I believe following the same method as PCMCIA followed initially is a good
option. I also now believe that with IrDA sitting on sourceforge it is an
ideal single point of contact for allthings linux and IrDA.
As long as patches and new versions of Linux-IrDA are announced on places
like freshmeat I can see no downside to this proposed method.
So Roll-on Linux-IrDA and Dag, keep having fun!
Just my 2pence worth!
Neil
On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, 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)
>
> 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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