Re: staging: me4000 and relation to other data acquisition devices

[Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:49:18AM -0500, Shawn Bohrer wrote:
> I have some questions about the user-kernel interface of the me4000
> driver.  From my looking through the code it seems specific to the
> me4000 hardware which does concern me since there are hundreds of
> different data acquisition devices from many different vendors.  In my
> opinion it would beneficial if at the very least all of these devices
> shared a common device interface.

I totally agree.

The me4000's user interface is not "set in stone" and needs to be fixed
up in order to move into the main kernel tree.

> Additionally there is the out of tree Comedi project:
> 
> http://comedi.org
> 
> Which supports this hardware, and many more, with a generic device
> interface.  There may be other reason not to merge Comedi (I know they
> have a desire to maintain support of their RT support), but I can't help
> but feel that merging the me4000 driver without thinking about the
> hundreds of other devices out there is a mistake.

I would love to get comedi into the kernel tree.  People have talked
about it for years now, is it time for me to just take a snapshot and
place it in drivers/staging/ for everyone to then work on cleaning up
properly?

thanks,

greg k-h