RE: Re: making progress with ACPI was: ACPI small patch up date

Grover, Andrew
2002-10-29T23:50:03Z

> From: Valette Eric [mailto:eric.valette-GANU6spQydw@public.gmane.org]
> I complained about that in the list in the past and got an
> answer saying
> politely to shut up, to *not* use sourceforge tool, and post
> problem to
> the mailling list. Fortunately dominik spend some time
> helping me until
> it worked.
>
> I also complained about acpi patches beeing done for 2.4 pre releases
> and not applying cleanly on 2.4.X official kernels.

If we have a prayer of ever getting into official 2.4, we need to track the
pre kernels. People in the past have done backports to the non-pre kernels,
but that really depends on what other people are willing to do.

> > I strongly believe that the ACPI project would make much
> more progress
> > if Andy and Robert put a little effort into tracking bugs and making
> > releases.
>
> I do agree. The more people do not want other to look/critic
> their code,
> the more they pretend what they do is a kind of black art, and do not
> document it or make design document :-) Fixing bug is
> annoying, making a
> new release and advising to report a problem on it is so more fun.

We can fix bugs, the problem is *diagnosing* the issue. There's only so much
diagnosis that can be done without the hardware. If you say "line 444 of
ec.c is acquiring a semaphore at interrupt level" that's probably enough. If
you post a patch, we'll apply it. If you just say "my system hangs" then
it's a lot harder. Sometimes the dmesg or DSDT are enough that other people
can suss out what might be the problem -- sometimes not.

Part of this whole open source "gift" economy is that it's polite to not
turn one's nose up a gift. Even if it wasn't all that you wanted. And
especially if you haven't reciprocated.

Regards -- Andy