Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] alix2: supplement driver to include GPIO button support

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:04:16 -0700
Philip Prindeville <philipp@redfish-solutions.com> wrote:

> > This is odd.  There are no references to this from outside this file
> > and it's hard to see how a wireless driver could use this - any such
> > driver would have to load this module on *all* machines (even non-x86)
> > simply to resolve this symbol.
> 
> It's for an out-of-tree driver that's only ever built for Alix hardware.

This should have been changelogged!  And a code comment would be good,
too - if it confused me now, it will confused others later.  And such a
code comment will help prevent others from coming in and "cleaning up"
the code later on.

Out-of-tree drivers are unpopular.  Where is this driver, what is its
license and what are the prospects of making it in-tree?

I don't personally have problems with helping out-of-tree drivers but
making it EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() would set minds at rest.

> Since it's only 4 bytes and one exported symbol, I figured it was acceptable...
> 
> I can remove it, resubmit, and use a patch locally in my tree if that's preferable

What we should do depends on the above issues...