Re: Why can't Johnny compile?

[john slee <indigoid@higherplane.net>]

> If people want to get rivafb or an ancient ISA net driver building 
> again... patches welcome.  But I don't think calls for the kernel to 

yep, someone is maintaining ewrk3 again now :-), or at least i have seen
a couple of patches submitted

> compile 100 percent of the drivers is realistic or even reasonable. 
> Some of the APIs, particularly SCSI, are undergoing API stabilization. 

the api stabilization should have been happening months ago, in view of
the october freeze

> And SCSI is an excellent example of drivers where 
> I-dont-have-test-hardware patches to fix compilation may miss subtle 
> problems -- and then six months later when the compileable-but-broken 
> SCSI driver is used by a real user, we have to spend more time in the 
> long run tracking down the problem.

certainly, and sometimes i wonder if there could be a better way (than
#error or #warning) to tag things as known broken.  currently people use
#error during compile, but i'd like to see it show up in menuconfig
somehow.

been thinking about it, but i haven't thought of a palatable solution
yet.  keeping the tag in the source files (as it is now) is probably a
good idea, but is suboptimal for external tools.  menuconfig doesn't
want to know about the actual source files

j.

-- 
toyota power: http://indigoid.net/