Re: Adding a new platform

[Geert Uytterhoeven <Geert.Uytterhoeven@sonycom.com>]

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On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, Charles Manning wrote:
> 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.

My experience with Linux/m68k tells me that +95% of the breakage is visible
by compiler warnings and errors. If it still compiles, it still works ;-)

> 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 :-).

Really? So how come so few changes are needed to keep squashfs working?

With kind regards,

Geert Uytterhoeven
Software Architect

Sony Techsoft Centre Europe
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