Re: Please pull 'revert-libertas' branch of wireless-2.6 (was Re: Please pull 'libertas' branch of wireless-2.6)

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 11:22 -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> John W. Linville wrote:
> > On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 08:03:43AM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> >> On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 11:41 +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > 
> >>> Of course it's not anywhere near good shape.  Almost all items from my
> >>> review were completely ignored, and we have another totoally substandard
> >>> wireless driver with crappy thread handling, a huge number of broken private
> >>> ioctls and partially absymal codingstyle.
> > 
> >> I've already updated libertas-2.6 git with a ton of updates for this.
> >>
> >> In any case, lets push off any merge until 2.6.23 so the rest of the
> >> comments can be dealt with:
> > 
> > Alright...Jeff, would you please pull the following branch for upstream ASAP:
> > 
> > 	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/linville/wireless-2.6.git revert-libertas
> 
> This is leading from behind :/  We don't need to blow about in the wind 
> here.  If you reviewed the driver in depth -- which I assumed because of 
> the trust placed in you as wireless maintainer -- then this situation 
> really should not be happening.  You need to know the status of new 
> drivers you are pushing upstream: what work is left to do, what has been 
> done, what state the driver is in.
> 
> I view this request as a failure of the trust network :(
> 
> For my part, I _did_ review it.  Twice.  Once in the early days, and 
> once when I pulled it into my netdev-2.6.git tree.  libertas needs the 
> changes mentioned in this thread.  But the driver is in workable shape 
> to be USED while being improved.  I strongly dislike people being cowed 
> into not merging a driver for years, because the driver in question does 
> not meet Christoph's idea of perfection.
> 
> Open source is about release early, release often.  Not "hide code in a 
> dark corner until Christoph thinks it is perfect."  We have high 
> standards for upstream merged code, but that standard is not perfection. 
>   Perfect is the enemy of good.
> 
> I would rather see the libertas-2.6 git changes pulled into upstream, 
> and am not inclined to revert a WORKING DRIVER at this point, a driver 
> that is actively maintained and has seen quite a bit of improvement 
> since it initially appeared.
> 
> IMO, Linux users best served by avoiding this silly song and dance, now 
> that the driver is upstream.

Ok, somebody make an executive decision then.  As it stands, the driver
_does_ work.  Everyone understands it needs the cleanups that Christoph
has mentioned, and those of us who work on it certainly will keep
cleaning it up to hopefully match Christoph's expectations.  Some of
that has already been done in upstream git.

So, either we push it off until 2.6.23, or it gets merged as-is and we
clean it up as we go along, which we'll certainly do.

Dan

> Plus, that leaves the kernel history less polluted.
> 
> 	Jeff
> 
> 
> 
>