Re: [PATCH] staging:brcm80211:brcmfmac:change firmware/config file name

["Henry Ptasinski" <henryp@broadcom.com>]

(Adding linux-wireless for input on firmware naming best practices.)

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 06:03:20PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 05:55:46PM -0700, Henry Ptasinski wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 05:47:43PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > > On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 04:45:26PM -0700, Nohee Ko wrote:
> > > > >>
> > > > Have you made the same changes in the linux-firmware source tree as
> > > > well?  Without changing it there, this could get messy.
> > > > <<
> > > > 
> > > > No not yet. But we are planning sooner or later.
> > > 
> > > Please do it sooner.
> > > 
> > > I'll wait for that to happen before committing this patch.
> > 
> > There's no specific changes needed in the linux-firmware repo to work with this
> > driver change.  There is a bugfix version of the firmware that we're getting
> > ready to send up, which is the motivation for this change, but the change
> > will work properly with the firmware that's in the repo today.
> 
> How, you just renamed the file you look for in the driver, right?
> 
> > All this change does is replace the hard-coded full firmware filename used in
> > the driver with the basename-apiversion construction as documented in
> > 
> > 	http://www.linuxwireless.org/en/developers/Documentation/firmware-versioning
> > 
> > plus add some info to the README to help users get the firmware properly
> > installed.
> > 
> > Users will need to create the symlinks as described in the README to use these
> > driver changes.
> 
> Yes, so you just broke their working setup, right?
> 
> So, please get linux-firmware fixed to add the proper symlinks, and then
> I can apply the patch, and say "go upgrade your linux-firmware package",
> which is almost acceptable.

Ah, I didn't realize we should have the symlinks in the linux-firmware repo.
We didn't do that for the brcm80211 driver (same instructions to create
symlinks by hand are in the README for that driver), and nobody pointed it out
as being an issue.

But I note that the linux-firmware repo doesn't contain any symlinks, and I'm
having trouble finding any other driver that's using this approach.  It looks
like everybody is either just doing some variant of basename-apiversion, or
hardcoding the complete firmware name (with codeversion) in theer driver.

Should we just punt on the codeversion portion?  Thoughts?

Thanks,
- Henry