Re: time for some drivers to be removed?

John Bradford
2003-07-25T10:45:39Z

> > A CONFIG_KNOWN_BROKEN option is a good thing, in the case where,
> > E.G. a SCSI driver is broken, and will randomly corrupt data, but
> > otherwise compiles and appears to work.
>
> I agree on that.
>
> Maybe I should make my point more clear. What bothers me is that a lot
> of (early 2.4) kernel versions could easely be configured non-compiling.
> Not just for exotic configurations, but also when building for an
> average PC.
>
> That is very confusing (and anoying) for all kernel builders, as you can
> not always easely tell if the kernel doesn't compile because of
> misconfiguration or because of code errors.
>
> I hope that this can be avoided for 2.6.0. "Fixing" device drivers by
> calling them obsolete, is not the right way. Because drivers that are
> broken and fixed by nobody might not be obsolete.
>
> So for 2.6.0, I propose to only mark obsolete what is really obsolete.
> Maybe everything that is broken since 2.2 and nobody complained about
> it. Then, mark broken what is broken for some time and nobody is
> (currenly) willing/able to fix.

Hmmm, maybe it's just me, but I think of obsolete as meaning something
that's due to be removed whether it works or not, because it's
functionality is no longer required. I thought we had
CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL for not sufficiently tested code.

It always used to be that with no CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL tagged code
compiled in, it was very rare to get a compile failiure. You could
rely on any kernel building, as long as you didn't touch
CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL.

Unfortunately, what seems to have happened is that things that really
should be tagged with CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL, are so desired by a lot of
users that they are being moved out of the experimental phase too
soon.

John.