Re: [PATCH] 2.5.8 IDE 36

Anton Altaparmakov
2002-04-17T09:27:49Z

At 08:46 17/04/02, Martin Dalecki wrote:
>Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>>My understanding it that Tivo behaves like some Amiga's here
>>and has broken swapping of the IDE bus itself, not the ext2
>>filesystem.
>>On PPC, we still have some historical horrible macros redefinitions
>>in asm/ide.h to let APUS (PPC Amiga) deal with these.
>>Now, the problem of dealing with DMA along with the swapping is
>>something scary. I beleive the sanest solution that won't please
>>affected people is to _not_ support DMA on these broken HW ;)
>
>No: the sane sollution would be to not support swapping disks between
>those systems and other systems.

<disclaimer: rant>

No it isn't. You can't just go removing features people use. Your attitude
as the new IDE maintainer is a bit distressing.

In the sake of a cleanup you start throwing away one feature after the
other. IMHO cleanups are not worth feature removal, obviously your opinion
differs. Hopefully, we will see the features come back but still the
interim is annoying for some people...

Also, even more distressing is that you seem to be almost completely
unresponsive to bug reports about your IDE changes completely breaking IDE.
My email reporting in detail how any post 2.5.7 kernel fails to boot due to
hanging during IDE device discovery was left unanswered. Off-line I am told
you responded to another similar bug report trying to shift the blame to
someone else's code and when it became apparent it was the IDE code you
just stopped responding. Do you expect everyone to understand IDE and find
and fix your bugs? A maintainer of a subsystem should work with people to
find bugs and fix them, not expect users to do that... Your IDE patches
keep flowing in one after the other but you completely ignore the fact that
you broke IDE for some people along the way and the chances of it fixing
itself by accident are minute... and finding the bug is probably getting
harder with every patch you submit...

This is _not_ what I would expect from a maintainer of such an important
subsystem!

</rant>

Apologies for the rant but I feel a lot better now.

Best regards,

Anton

--
"I've not lost my mind. It's backed up on tape somewhere." - Unknown
--
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cantab.net> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / IRC: #ntfs on irc.openprojects.net
WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/ & http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/