Re: (Short?) merge window reminder

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

On 05/24/2011 08:07 AM, jonsmirl@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
>> Can we drop most of MCA, EISA and ISA bus if we are going to have a big
>> version change ? A driver spring clean is much overdue and it's all in
>> git in case someone wishes to sneak out at midnight and bring some crawly
>> horror back from the dead.
> 
> 2.8 could mark the beginning of the great cleanup
>   --- work out the details of what needs to be cleaned and set a goal
>   --- remove old buses/driver, switch to device tree, graphics, 32/64
> merges, etc
> 3.0 would mark its completion
> 

I think this whole discussion misses the essence of the new development
model, which is that we no longer do these kinds of feature-based major
milestones.  If we want to to deprecate lots of drivers (which I
personally would advocate against -- I have built systems specifically
to run a real floppy drive since the Linux floppy driver is amazingly
flexible and can read/write a lot of formats that nothing else can,
including USB floppies) then we should do that in the normal course of
action, incrementally, and listed in feature-removal-schedule.txt, not
all at once due to some arbitrary milestone.

We have found it works better this way.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.