On Sun, 19 Oct 2003, Greg KH wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 11:16:37AM -0400, Alan Stern wrote:
> > Greg:
> > 
> > Do you have any idea when serious new development will re-commence?  
> 
> Has it ever really stopped?  :)

Sometimes I wish it would, just for a little while...

> > There's a bunch of things I'd like to do, and it would nice to know how  
> > long they will have to stay on the back burner.  (That includes a scheme 
> > for fixing this recent problem with non-compliant USB devices having 
> > invalid interface numbers.)
> 
> For bug fixes (like the interface number thing), that will have no
> problem being accepted right now.  For major overhauls, with the only
> reason being to simplify the code, that should probably wait until 2.7.
> For things inbetween, I don't know.  Some if it could go into the 2.6
> tree, if it fixes problems, and makes life easier for people.  It would
> have to be on a case-by-case basis.

Hmm...  The interface number fix means making adjustments to a number of 
drivers.  Here's the idea:  Up to now the USB stack has supported the 
notion, explicitly stated in the USB specification, that interface numbers 
are 0-based array indexes into the list of interfaces supported by a 
configuration.  To handle non-compliant devices correctly we need to stop 
supporting that notion -- instead the routine ifnum_to_if() will supply an 
opaque mapping from interface numbers to interfaces.  But many drivers use 
the technique of just looking up the bInterfaceNumber element of the 
usb_host_config array.  They will all have to be changed to use 
ifnum_to_if() instead.

Does that sound like something that could be done right away, or should it 
wait, say, until after 2.6.0-final is released?

> But don't let any of this stop you from doing big stuff if you want to.
> Big things should probably live out of the tree for a while anyway, with
> people beating on them, shaking out the kinks.

Is there any way we can set up some sort of temporary tree, so that large
changes can be shared in the meantime among developers easily via
BitKeeper?

Alan Stern



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