Re: [GIT]: Networking

Jiri Kosina
2008-08-20T16:46:51Z

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> - but as a special case, we relax that for totally new drivers (and that
> includes things like just adding a new PCI or USB ID's to old drivers),
> because (a) it can't really regress

It in fact depends on your definition of regression really :)

If we merge a buggy driver that hangs the user's machine when loaded, well
... before the driver has been merged, the machine had been booting well,
just some hardware was not functioning at all. After this late driver
merge, the driver gets autoloaded upon boot and crashes the machine. Users
will probably see this as a regression.

This doesn't mean that I am against merging new drivers as aggressively as
possible, I just wanted to point out that it might bring actual
regressions to users.

--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs