Re: YAFFS in the kernel tree?

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2-wEGCiKHe2LqWVfeAwA7xHQ@public.gmane.org>]

On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 09:34 +1200, Charles Manning wrote:
> The main reason for those version checks is that YAFFS tries to acknowledge 
> that not everyone just uses the latest kernel. Many embedded developers are 
> using older kernels (for various valid reasons) 

The only vaguely valid reason I've ever heard is that they've already
been through QA and are shipping a product based on the old kernel, and
now they need some minor bug fixes. Even for a more serious product
update adding new features, it should be able to switch to a newer
kernel unless you've made some horrendous mistakes in the original
deployment, like not getting everything you use merged upstream.

And still -- if they choose to use an ancient and known-broken version
of the rest of the kernel, why would they want to combine that with the
newest, shiniest version of YAFFS? It just doesn't make sense.

I used to keep JFFS2 building for older kernels; I don't for a moment
regret abandoning that effort. Far from being helpful, I actually think
it was counter-productive, because it made people think that was a
_sane_ thing for them to be doing. It just isn't.

> I would expect that this would make for two versions of yaffs_fs.c:
> the CVS one for all comers and the in-tree version which is cleaned.

It's not even that hard to maintain those in parallel with a modern
version control system like git, pulling changes from one tree to the
other. We export JFFS2 for use in eCos that way.

-- 
dwmw2

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