Re: pwc+pwcx is not illegal

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Sul, 2004-08-29 at 17:33, Nemosoft Unv. wrote:
> That's one of the reasons I requested PWC to be removed. For me, it's also a 
> matter of quality: what good is a half-baked driver in the kernel when you 
> need to patch it first to get it working fully again? I don't want my name 
> attached to that.

It works very well for some users without that code. The raw pass
through for the compressed bitstreams solved the problems for the rest.
You appear to be seeking to hurt your userbase for your own ends. Thats
not pleasant behaviour.  I can more than understand
"take my name off it, make it clear its nothing to do with me".

> > Its also trivial to move the decompressor to user space 
> > where it should be anyway. 
> 
> *sigh* As I have been saying a 100 times before, it is illogical, cumbersome 
> for both users and developers, and will probably take a very long time to 
> adopt (notwithstanding V4L2 [*]). 

Video4linux has -always- specified decompressors in user space. This was
pointed out ages ago. V4L2 rationalised it even more clearly.

> *IF* there was a commonly accepted video "middle-layer", this would not pose 
> much of a problem. But there is no such thing yet.
> 
> (maybe that's something for a 2.7 kernel...)

No its for userspace. Just add it to the relevant video frameworks.

> Seriously, this probably would not have happened if, back in 2001, the 
> driver was rejected on the basis of this hook (you were there, Alan...) I 
> never made a secret of it, it has been in the driver from day 1 and its 
> purpose was clearly spelled out. If it had been rejected, I would probably 
> have just switched to '3rd party module' mode and maintained it outside the 
> kernel indefinetely. I would not have liked it, but it would have been 
> acceptable.

Back in 2001 I was saying that this was broken and it belonged in user
space.

> of thing in the kernel. However, since we're a bit late to react, we'll 
> leave it in the 2.4 and 2.6 series, but versions beyond that (2.7-devel, 
> etc) will not have PWC included in this form. In the mean time, we're 
> asking you to think of a solution". Chances are the situation would have 
> been fully resolved before that (and I mean fully *hint*).

There isn't a plan to have a 2.7 development tree but to do gradual
development until something major comes up. That makes the suggestion
rather more tricky - as does the legal question.