Re: [PATCH 8/8] macintosh/adb-iop: Implement SRQ autopolling

[Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>]

Hi Brad,

On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 10:01 PM Brad Boyer <flar@allandria.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 10:38:04AM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> > >  arch/m68k/include/asm/adb_iop.h |  1 +
> > As this header file is used by a single source file only, perhaps it should
> > just be absorbed by the latter?
> > Then you no longer need my Acked-by for future changes ;-)
>
> While I don't really feel involved in this specific change (although I
> was one of the testers when the driver was first written), I am a little
> curious about the current coding standards. This header is pretty much
> just a declaration of the hardware interface, of which there are many
> in this directory. Is it better to just define all the offsets and bits
> for hardware registers inside the driver? We used to always put them in
> headers like this, but is that not the current standard? Would it be
> cleaner to put such headers in the directory with the driver effectively
> making them private? I seem to see quite a bit of that as well.

The idea behind header files is to share definitions among multipe
source files, right? It seems there is only one user of this header
file, so no sharing is involved, and thus these definitions are
de-facto private to the driver.  Hence, the hardware declarations
could be absorbed by the driver source file.

In this case having two separate files makes maintenance more
difficult, as the two files belong to different maintainer spaces
(drivers/macintosh/ and arch/m68k/).

In general, moving header files to the driver directory is an option,
if nothing outside the driver directory needs it.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds