> The reason is the maintenance load it produces. There's a continuous, > annoying trickle of patch proposals, discussions, conflicts with > development in other, still actively maintained areas of the kernel, > and so on. The present discussion being a point in case. > > > Does it hurt anyone to leave the code in there, despite it barely > > being used? > > Yes it does. Not much, but the pain is increasing over the years. > Every time someone tries to touch that code there's the problem > that no one can actually answer for it, much less test anything.
The same has been happening with a lot of other code. For i2o I've followed the pattern a few other drivers have used. I sent GregKH a patch to move it into staging, and if nobody steps up then it will vanish in a few releases. > > We're not talking about a particularly huge driver here, either. > > But one that's particularly difficult to maintain, without > providing any noticeable benefit in return. I'm also not sure a pretty, polished and untested driver is actually better than someone who needs it going back to an old tree and a known working driver to forward port. Alan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
