Re: [GIT PULL] Squashfs pull request for 2.6.29

Greg KH
2009-01-22T22:02:57Z

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 04:50:41PM -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 08:30:18AM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
>
> > I was wanting to stick with drivers to start with, but I really have no
> > objection to adding filesystems, if they are self-contained, to the
> > drivers/staging/ directory.
> >
> > I looked at adding squashfs, but at the time, it touched other portions
> > of the kernel which wouldn't have made it a good canidate for staging.
> > This was later resolved, and now that it is merged, it's a moot issue :)
> >
> > So, if anyone wants to send me filesystems, I'll be glad to take them
> > into drivers/staging, as long as they are self-contained (novfs for
> > example would fit this category.)
>
> Filesystems in staging worries me.
>
> * The number of people who competently review filesystem code
> (and I mean real review here, not checkpatch & codingstyle crap)
> is significantly less than those who review drivers.
> I foresee stuff just lingering there for years.
> (Look how long fs stuff hangs around unmerged in -mm for example).

If it lingers, it has a better chance of getting cleaned up here, than
if it lives in -mm, right?

> * The fallout of staging is already starting to drift into distros.
> Within a week of Fedora shipping a kernel that had staging/
> we had requests to enable drivers from it.
> And of course, those drivers were garbage.
> This is only going to increase as time goes on.

That's up to you as a distro to handle, not much I can do there.

But, if you want a recommendation, some of the drivers in staging came
from the Fedora kernel tree, so you should be enabling them :)

> * For crap drivers that a minority cares about, this isn't a big deal
> to tell the users "build it yourself, we don't support it when stuff breaks".
> (And a lot of that crap will break. NetworkManager won't work properly
> with some of the wireless crap in staging for example), but by
> continually adding to the shitpile the potential for review dramatically
> gets reduced, and for something as critical as a filesystem, I find this
> absolutely terrifying from a support perspective.

>From a support perspective, if I see the TAINT_CRAP flag set, we just
instantly close the bug out. Already done that a number of times for
openSUSE bugs, with no problems.

> I don't mean to piss on your parade, but from my viewpoint, staging
> is a trainwreck so far, and I'd hate to see it get worse.

What is wrong with it? Bugs are getting fixed, people are getting use
out of their hardware (hell, Linus is even using one of the drivers),
and lots of developers are cutting their teeth on helping out.

If you don't like it, just disable it in your kernel packages, or
instantly close out the bugs. The drivers in staging has already helped
out some distros by virtue of including newer drivers than they were
mistakenly using at the time (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you...)

And again, it's helped out users, which is the most important thing
here.

thanks,

greg k-h