Janne Karhunen wrote:
On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 08:54 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
And no, I don't have all the hardware at all, that's impossible. I've
written drivers for devices where I have never seen the hardware, and
they work just fine (or so I'm told.) Having the hardware, or even
access to it is not a requirement at all to do development and/or
maintenance.
Given that you want to be absolutely certain you didn't
break it you effectively need to retest. But obviously
once again we are serving and relying on hordes of Joe
Random Hackers that will retest the driver and report.
Single regression for 'normal' user would probably
render the whole thing useless.
So most certainly maintenance is not done. And actually,
most of the testing effort done against the original driver
was just rendered useless with the API tweak.
No, not at all. That's just not how the Linux kernel development
process works, sorry. I can go into the whole testing process if you
really want to know, but that has nothing to do with the change of APIs.
Well, duh. Of course any change, API or otherwise, can
trigger a regression. And the regressions make it sure
real life John/Jane Does fail using Linux. I use the
word 'regression' because 99.999% of all imaginable
things have used to work in some version of Linux..
I find it odd that people who do not have experience in doing Linux
kernel development and API changes would insist that the current model
we are using is broken...
No no, you got this all wrong. I'm not saying I know
a better solution - far from it. All I'm trying to
say is that current model does *not* serve _regular_
users. Linux is a hacker tool for hackers. That's
what the topic was all about.
No, not at all. You should be able to drop in a new kernel just fine,
with only minor package updates at times.
Joe Random Hacker can, regular user can't.
rpm -ihv new_kernel_package.rpm
zypper install new_kernel_package.rpm
You really can't be serious here. Now, please explain
in detail what regular user would do if that left him/
her without a working kernel. This happens at least
once per month to me.
Not a single IT department on this whole planet would
allow you to reinstall kernel to get one bloody driver
update. It usually takes gazillion geeks to fix the
regressions that show'd up. This costs some serious
money. Really.
or use some gui tool. People do it all the time. And they help us out
with testing in ways that we developers can not do. So yes, "regular
user" can do this, and they do, every single day.
You obviously have very different view of 'regular
user' than the rest of us. John/Jane Doe can NOT
help you debug a kernel. Nor does he/she wish to.
Heck, she doesn't even know what kernel IS.
I'm a systems engineer (and I've spent my entire time
in the Unix world, going back to 1983, with some
experience with Linux -- all my home machines are Linux)
and frankly, even I don't have the confidence to be
doing the kinds of things that Greg is talking about.
Frankly, if something goes wrong, I don't want to
spend the time trying to undo it all. So, I wait
for the "official" software updates with everything
all worked out.
And, until this mess is worked out with the 3D cards,
i'm just not using hardware 3D, unless it's OpenGL.
I don't need the headaches.
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