Re: Why can't Johnny compile?

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

john slee wrote:

> >If people want to get rivafb or an ancient ISA net driver building
> >again... patches welcome.  But I don't think calls for the kernel to
>
>
> yep, someone is maintaining ewrk3 again now :-), or at least i have seen
> a couple of patches submitted


hehe, yep, in fact there is an ewrk3 patch I still need to merge :)

> >compile 100 percent of the drivers is realistic or even reasonable.
> >Some of the APIs, particularly SCSI, are undergoing API stabilization.
>
>
> the api stabilization should have been happening months ago, in view of
> the october freeze


october freeze was for major features, not minor incremental tweaks...


> >And SCSI is an excellent example of drivers where
> >I-dont-have-test-hardware patches to fix compilation may miss subtle
> >problems -- and then six months later when the compileable-but-broken
> >SCSI driver is used by a real user, we have to spend more time in the
> >long run tracking down the problem.
>
>
> certainly, and sometimes i wonder if there could be a better way (than
> #error or #warning) to tag things as known broken.  currently people use
> #error during compile, but i'd like to see it show up in menuconfig
> somehow.


I respectfully disagree...  I think if these sort of FIXMEs show up in 
menuconfig, you're not only cluttering up menuconfig, you also moving 
past the level of programmer to the sysadmin/power-user level.  That 
seems like it would generate more bug reports than useful work.

About the only thing WRT menuconfig I would be ok with is commenting out 
majorly broken drivers until they are fixed...

	Jeff