On Sat, 2014-05-24 at 16:13 +0400, James Bottomley wrote: > Wait, no, that's not a good idea. We leave obsolete drivers to bitrot. > Particularly we try not to touch them unless we have to because there > might be a few people still using them and the more we tamper, the > greater the risk that something gets broken.
Which is also a way to notice whether people still use those obsolete drivers. > On that principle, since > there's no real reason to remove the code, (Unless one carries the hope that any check, treewide, for a CONFIG_* macro can be linked to a proper Kconfig symbol.) > it should stay ... until the > whole driver bitrots to the extent that we can no-longer compile it. I've run into this depreciation policy before. With aic7xxx_old (which I eventually convinced Fedora to disable, a few relases before it was removed from the tree). With aic94xx (which I also convinced Fedora to disable). I also tried multiple times to shut up advansys' compile time[1]. It seems SCSI might risk not to notice their bitrot, because eventually everybody stops compiling these obsolete drivers, leaving SCSI without feedback on their state. Anyhow, SCSI seems to be the only subsystem that uses this subcategory of not-really-maintained drivers. Other subsystems appear to allow anything to be fixed, even trivialities, which are what I tend to fix, and only stop allowing fixes if the drivers involved are going to be removed anyway. But maybe I just never ran into that category in other subsystems. > However, I'll do this if the Maintainer (rmk) acks ... because if it > breaks he gets to fix it. Paul Bolle [1] advansys prints a pointless compile time warning, on purpose. Clearly no one cares about its "wide board" support, but for some reason that warning needs to stay in. (Fedora declined to disable that driver.) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
