Hi Juho,

On Thursday 16 October 2008, Juho Vähä-Herttua wrote:
> Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > To be honest, learning yet another version control system is one of the
> > reasons why I'm reluctant to switch over to Mercurial. I would have
> > preferred using a git repository instead.
>
> In fact I would prefer git as well, but if hosting is mercurial only
> then... :)

It would be much easier for me to maintain the driver in a kernel git tree, 
but then we would loose all backward compatibility. Let's not go that far 
yet :-)

> > However, I expect most people to be interested in the latest version
> > only. In that case they can easily download a tarball. I might be wrong,
> > but I imagine that most people who will download the uvcvideo sources
> > directly from the repository will, now that the driver has been included
> > in the kernel, just want to try the latest version to get a patch specific
> > to their issue.
>
> Hmm, that's probably the case.
>
> > How many developers checkout a non-head SVN revision or use SVN log or
> > diff commands on the Linux UVC SVN repository ? I'd really like to have
> > statistics on such usage.
>
> I wasn't really referring to the log or even diff commands per se.
> Rather keeping oneself up to date with the latest repository without
> redownloading it.

Good point. It's definitely easier to svn up than to download a new tarball 
and look at the diff output.

> > Very good point.
> > http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/MajorFeatures 
> > states that Mercurial uses "Bandwidth and CPU efficient HTTP and SSH sync
> > protocols" so I guess this won't be an issue.
>
> Yeah, according to that it seems to be a non-issue.
>
> > Hence my question above about usage of SVN log and diff commands
> > (commit is not an issue as I'm currently the only committer). Do you feel
> > that tarballs are unpractical for the majority of users who just want to
> > try the latest version ?
>
> I'm not committing, but sometimes syncing and diffing to check if
> there's a workaround for the old camera issue my camera had. :p

Feel free to report the issue if it's still present in the latest version :-)

> > You only need a single tarball, the one containing the tree you want to
> > checkout (in our case this would be the linux-uvc tree). People
> > complained in the past about the lack of tarball and the required use of
> > SVN so I thought everybody would be happy with tarballs, but it seems this
> > is not the case :-)
>
> But I understood you also need to get the v4l/dvb core sources and
> maybe some other modules to compile it, would they be in the same
> tarball or how are they got?

They would be in the same tree, thus in the same tarball. make && make install 
(or a small variation thereof) should install everything 
in /lib/modules/`uname -r`.

> Don't take my opinion as the general opinion though, I'm just personally
> happier with svn compared to tarballs but most people probably aren't. :)
>
> > I'd stick to SVN too if it wasn't for the #ifdef's :-/
>
> I guess that's good enough reason, as I said if that's the thing to
> avoid ugly code then should just go for it.
>
> > download a tarball. This in itself lowers the barrier. They will also
> > have to compile and install the v4l core modules in addition to the
> > uvcvideo module.
>
> > That could raise the barrier, but don't forget that there should be more
> > community support as compiling and installing a linuxtv.org tree is an
> > operation performed by more users than compiling and installing the
> > uvcvideo driver. In a quick chat on the #v4l IRC channel I got told v4l
> > developers do
>
> It's just that the first time I checked out and compiled uvcvideo I
> was slightly amazed at how easy and painless everything went. That
> sounds like it will go from amazing to a slight pain in the ass in the
> future, but that should be acceptable.

The v4l tree compilation and installation procedure seems quite 
straightforward. You can either build and install all modules (make && make 
install) or configure the ones you need (make menuconfig). It shouldn't get 
more difficult than that.

> I'm mainly replying because you asked for comments, in the end it's your
> call since you do the commits. :) 

And I'm glad you replied, otherwise the amount of comments would have been 
divided by two.

Cheers,

Laurent Pinchart
_______________________________________________
Linux-uvc-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/linux-uvc-devel

Reply via email to