Re: Adding a new platform

[Charles Manning <manningc2@actrix.gen.nz>]

On Wednesday 20 August 2008 17:15:01 vb wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 9:29 PM, Paul Gortmaker
>
> <paul.gortmaker@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:57 PM, vb <vb@vsbe.com> wrote:
> >> so, say a developer submits a proprietary driver and it gets accepted.
> >
> > Doesn't happen.  By design.  If the driver is proprietary then it is
> > presumably not meant for open distribution, and hence not compatible with
> > GPL and widespread distribution into 100,000 public git repositories.  So
> > it won't get submitted and it won't get accepted.
>
> I guess 'proprietary' is not the right term then, how do you call a
> driver which is not a secret and not a problem to release, but
> controls some hardware present in only in certain devices of a certain
> company.
>
> Would such a driver be accepted? Wouldn't such a driver get stale
> after a few kernel releases?

In-tree is no silver bullet.

When people modify internal APIs they will likely fix anything that breaks 
compilation. However many things are more subtle than that and it is very 
easy to end up with a driver or other code that compiles but does not work 
properly.

Luckily APIs for drivers (the most common stuff that people work on) don't 
change that much, and the interfaces are reasonably clear. If you want some 
hell then try working on file systems :-).