Re: Merging of completely unreviewed drivers

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

On Thu 2008-02-21 14:08:55, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:01:24 +0200
> Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> > [ Linus Added to the To: since I want to hear his opinion on this
> > issue. ]
> > 
> > On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 12:28:55PM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:
> > >  > This driver should really have gotten some review before being
> > >  > included in the kernel.
> > > 
> > >  > Even a simple checkpatch run finds more than > 250 stylistic
> > >  > errors (not code bugs but cases where the driver violates the
> > >  > standard code formatting rules of kernel code).
> > > 
> > > Linus has strongly stated that we should merge hardware drivers
> > > early, and I agree: although the nes driver clearly needs more
> > > work, there's no advantage to users with the hardware in forcing
> > > them to wait for 2.6.26 to merge the driver, since they'll just
> > > have to patch the grungy code in themselves anyway.  And by merging
> > > the driver early, we get fixed up for any tree-wide changes and
> > > allow janitors to help with the cleanup.
> > 
> > Is it really intended to merge drivers without _any_ kind of review?
> 
> No of course not.
> 
> I totally agree we should be more agressive in merging drivers earlier.
> A minimal review needs to happen so for a few things imo
> 1) That the driver doesn't break the build
> 2) That the driver has no obvious huge security holes
>    (this is a big deal for unsuspecting users)
> 3) that there's not an obscene amount of "uses deprecated api" compiler warnings
>    (since those are annoying for everyone else)
> 4) that people who don't have the hardware are not negatively affected
>    (say crashes without the hw or so)

5) does not introduce new and ugly user-kernel we'll have problems
fixing/removing?
							Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html