Re: Merging of completely unreviewed drivers

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

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)

FWIW, my general guidelines for merging drivers in my areas are:

1) it's not fugly

2) it has an active maintainer who responds to feedback


I tend to think it is NOT in the best interests of Linux users, for us 
to merge vendor-fugly drivers with many layers of OS wrappers and 
similar obfuscation.

But similarly...  I merge drivers long before our SCSI maintainer will, 
and I value "it works" above stupid checkpatch warnings.

	Jeff