Re: [2.6 patch] ieee1394_core.c: remove unneeded EXPORT_SYMBOL's

Ben Collins
2004-12-20T17:02:54Z

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 03:15:18PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Llu, 2004-12-20 at 14:39, Ben Collins wrote:
> > How about adding those exports into an config option ifdef that says
> > "Export extra IEEE-1394 symbols" and in the help explains that the symbols
> > may be needed for some third party modules. Give video-2-1394 as an
> > example.
>
> You might as well remove the ifdef if you do that since vendors will
> have to guess what the right answer is an will probably uniformly say
> "Y". At that point its basically a non-option. Far better to submit the
> driver

You are missing the point though. Lots of these are part of our API, and
may be used at anytime. Lots of college kids are emailing me about
projects they are working on, and quite a few of them are using this API.
None of those projects will ever get out of the classroom, much less get
into the kernel mainline. But that API is needed, none-the-less, to expose
the internals of the system.

I'd hate to think that our "license" worries outweigh the small hacker
community for some projects.

--
Debian - http://www.debian.org/
Linux 1394 - http://www.linux1394.org/
Subversion - http://subversion.tigris.org/
WatchGuard - http://www.watchguard.com/