Re: rtl2860 driver in mainline?

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 08:06:39AM +0000, Luis Correia wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 08:02, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:56 AM, Johannes Berg
> > <johannes@sipsolutions.net> wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 08:03 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> >>> On 28.10.2008 01:49, Greg KH wrote:
> >>> > So, on my quest to suck up every out-of-tree driver and get it into the
> >>> > main kernel tree (drivers/staging/ to start with), I've been pointed at
> >>> > the rtl2860 driver.
> >>>
> >>> Does it really make sense to include a driver when a different one for
> >>> mainline inclusion is being actively developed? It might give some
> >>> developers the impression that it's worth spending time improving the
> >>> rtl2860/2870 drivers -- which might be wasted time in the end.
> >>
> >> I don't think it makes sense either, at _best_ it'll do nothing but help
> >> a few users [1], and if somebody actually starts working on the vendor
> >> driver because it's in staging that's actively harmful to the real
> >> driver by diverting resources away from it.
> >>
> >> johannes
> >>
> >> [1] I used to think the point wasn't to make users happy but to make it
> >> easier to work on those drivers, but that objective seems long gone
> >
> > Problem is distributions already ship crap anyway.
> 
> Exactly, last April I realised that Caixa Magica (the Portuguese
> Mandriva spinoff) already had two drivers for Ralink chipsets, being
> that it even had wrong usb ID's in the code. (a rtl8187 was identified
> as rt72usb..)

It is this kind of problem that I am trying to address here.  If these
drivers are in the kernel, then this stuff can easily be fixed, so the
distros can't get it wrong (well, it will take some effort on their part
to get it wrong...)

thanks,

greg k-h