Re: [PATCH 2/3] ide: add at91_ide driver

[Sergei Shtylyov <sshtylyov@ru.mvista.com>]

Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:

>>>>   Can you answer the simple question: why we should try to support 
>>>>two incompatible chips with a single driver? Because the driver name 
>>>>will be shorter? :-)

>>>>Very funny. I think patch adding RM9200 support to this driver will 
>>>>have less
>>>>than 50 lines changeset,  whereas writing new driver would be about 
>>>>500 lines.

>>>   This approach is so broken-minded that I'm just out words to argue 
>>>any more.

>>>   Let's then support say all the PCI IDE chipsets with the single 
>>>driver (actully, there was a driver that tried to support 2 
>>>incompatible Promise chip families but it got split finally).

> Actually it was the case for Linux during early 2.4.x days. :)

    And I've spent considerable time fixing this driver in 2.4.20. :-)

> [ Probably for historical reasons. ]

>>   To say the truth, there are stil at least 2 examples of such drivers: 
>>hpt366 and aec6210. While the former is justified by the bogus chip 

> The former can be probably still improved with hpt3xx_main.c and chipset
> family specific code separated into hpt36x.c etc.

    Don't think that there's even enough common code for hpt3xx_main.c.

>>identification poilicy used by the vendor, the latter has no 
>>justification at all.

> Patches are always warmly welcomed.

    There is just to much I'd like to be done with this driver and too little 
time to do that. :-)

> Thanks,
> Bart

MBR, Sergei