Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Pull network and Patch Acceptance Consistency

Joe Perches
2019-06-14T07:31:36Z

On Thu, 2019-06-13 at 23:03 -0400, Martin K. Petersen wrote:
> But I want patches from somebody who takes
> ownership and who is willing to validate things. Using real hardware,
> QEMU, output comparison, or interpretive dancing. Doesn't matter.

One of the strengths of linux is nominal support for old hardware.
But simultaneously those older hardware are also rarely tested.

Perhaps a mechanism to move these old, generally unsupported
by an actual maintainer, and rarely tested drivers out of the
mainline drivers directory into a separate obsolete directory
would help isolate the whitespace and trivial api changes.

> I think there is much to be learned from the process of buying
> an obsolete SCSI controller on eBay, beating a driver into shape,
> getting the changes merged, and committing to maintaining things going
> forward.

There is a also a decided lack of general interest in that too.