Re: gpio-ucb1400

[Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>]

On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 08:20:44PM +0100, Marek Vasut wrote:
> Dear Guenter Roeck,
> 
> > On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 08:46:39PM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > In September 2009, a driver for the GPIO function of the UCB1400 chip
> > > was added to the kernel tree. The probe function of this driver requires
> > > ucbdata to be set. The only place where this happens is in function
> > > ucb1400_gpio_set_data(). This function was never call, and still isn't.
> > > So this is dead code for 3.5 years as far as the upstream kernel is
> > > concerned.
> > > 
> > > To make things worse, this driver can't be built as a module, for no
> > > good reason that I can see.
> > > 
> > > Marek, can you explain what was the point of submitting this driver that
> > > nobody can use?
> > > 
> > > I would like either this driver to be fixed so that it can be used (and
> > > that would IMHO start with dropping the ugly ucb1400_gpio_set_data hook
> > > and global variable ucbdata), or this driver to be dropped from the
> > > kernel tree. If the driver is kept, it should be adjusted so that it can
> > > be built as a module.
> > > 
> > > If I overlooked something, please let me know.
> > 
> > Interestingly, the author made an attempt to fix that with [1]. It looks
> > like the rest of that series was merged, but this patch wasn't, though I
> > don't find any information about the reason.
> 
> It's been a while. Guenter, thanks for finding that link, but I suspect the 
> patch is heavily obsolete by now.
> 
Oh, it most definitely is, starting with the gpio driver name. Just wonder
why it was never applied, and why no one seems to have noticed or cared.

Jean is absolutely right - it should get fixed, or the driver should be dropped
if no one is using it anyway.

Guenter