Re: [PATCH] Try to make our poor little ALS4000 driver worthy of its copious public specs (first step)

[Rene Herman <rene.herman@keyaccess.nl>]

On 20-08-08 00:08, John L. Utz III wrote:

>> Never omitting any opportunity to complain about missing vendor 
>> cooperation, but what do they do once people actually do publish
>> ample specs? - yeah, you got that right: NOTHING!!
> 
> Congratulations on your patch, but i dont think this comment was 
> particularly helpful.

Oh, come one. He had his tongue quite firmly and definitely in cheek...

> Had the spec been released concurrent with the release of the chip,
> who knows what would have happened?
> 
> The ALS4k is not currently manufactured, so there is not a good
> reason to invest development resources in supporting it.
> 
> Time is better spent supporting new chips so that new distro releases
> can support new computers so that computer vendors and end users will
> feel less put out by having linux as the default OS for their brand
> new computer!

One of the main reasons for wanting specs over vendor supplied drivers 
in fact is to be able to support _old_ hardware -- hardware that the 
manfacturer feels no need to support anymore, but the users still want 
to use. As such, I believe the above is definitely off the mark.

But anyways, he was definitely being "joke-ish". You took it way too 
seriously.

Rene.