Re: Moving drivers into staging (was Re: [GIT PULL] SCSI fixes for 2.6.32-rc3)

Ingo Molnar
2009-10-14T06:33:59Z

* Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-10-13 at 21:45 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > How about when it was scheduled to be removed, we put it in staging and
> > I'll add it to my announcements about the staging tree every release?
> > Unless you can think of a better way?
>
> staging/to_be_removed_unless_fixed_by/v.x.y ?

Yes, that's a real worry. Some time ago i suggested:

drivers/staging/good/
drivers/staging/bad/
drivers/staging/ugly/

good: drivers that are to go upstream in the next cycle
bad: outgoing drivers being obsoleted or abandoned
ugly: incoming messy drivers with active developers

The messaging of this looks nice and the names are short and obvious.

An added benefit is that this kind of separation makes it easy for
people interested in drivers/staging to follow the 'status' of drivers.
Once stuff goes into 'good' a different kind of review is needed than if
a driver goes into 'ugly'.

The main disadvantage would be the PR angle: putting new drivers into a
path named 'ugly'. Not something you want to put into a quarterly status
report, right? If we put drivers/staging/ugly/ drivers into
drivers/staging/ itself, we'd solve that problem. I.e. we'd keep the
current scheme, but we'd also add drivers/staging/good/ and
drivers/staging/bad/ as two extra stages for incoming and outgoing
drivers.

A third version would be a more neutral name:

drivers/staging/incoming/
drivers/staging/outgoing/

I think it has many advantages, but (of course!) it all depends on
whether Greg wants to have any separation like this.

Ingo