Re: [GIT PULL] Staging driver patches for 3.19-rc1

Richard Weinberger
2014-12-15T18:36:08Z

Am 15.12.2014 um 19:30 schrieb Greg KH:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 07:23:35PM +0100, Richard Weinberger wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 6:55 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>> The following changes since commit 009d0431c3914de64666bec0d350e54fdd59df6a:
>>>
>>> Linux 3.18-rc7 (2014-11-30 16:42:27 -0800)
>>>
>>> are available in the git repository at:
>>>
>>> git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging.git/ tags/staging-3.19-rc1
>>>
>>> for you to fetch changes up to 17d2c6439be65777245914be354c5a97c76ad246:
>>>
>>> Staging: slicoss: Fix long line issues in slicoss.c (2014-12-02 16:54:43 -0800)
>>>
>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Staging patches for 3.19-rc1
>>>
>>> Here's the big staging tree pull request for 3.19-rc1.
>>>
>>> We continued to delete more lines than were added, always a good thing,
>>> but not at a huge rate this release, only about 70k lines removed
>>> overall mostly from removing the horrid bcm driver.
>>>
>>> Lots of normal staging driver cleanups and fixes all over the place,
>>> well over a thousand of them, the shortlog shows all the horrid details.
>>>
>>> The "contentious" thing here is the movement of the Android binder code
>>> out of staging into the "real" part of the kernel. This is code that
>>> has been stable for a few years now and is working as-is in the tens of
>>> millions of devices with no issues. Yes, the code is horrid, and the
>>> userspace api leaves a lot to be desired, but it's not going to change
>>> due to legacy issues that we have no control over. Because so many
>>> devices and companies rely on this, and the code is stable, might as
>>> well promote it out of staging.
>>>
>>> This was all discussed at the Linux Plumbers conference, and everyone
>>> participating agreed that this was the best way forward.
>>>
>>> There is work happening to replace the binder code with something new
>>> that is happening right now, but I don't expect to see the results of
>>> that work for another year at the earliest. If that ever happens, and
>>> Android switches over to it, I'll gladly remove this version
>>
>> I don't understand this kind of logic.
>> a) Binder is considered a piece of shite.
>
> A piece of "shite" that works for the domain it is in, and people rely
> on it.

Using this argument we could merge every singe vendor tree too.
The crap they carry works for their domain too... ;-)

>> b) Google is working on a (hopefully sane) replacement.
>
> I never said that Google was the one working on a replacement.

Okay. Who is working on it?
Is there a change that Android will pick it up?

>> Why moving it out of staging then? What is the benefit?
>> Keep it there for more 2-3 years and then remove it.
>
> Because code in staging either has to progress forward to be merged out
> of staging, or it gets deleted. Just leaving it in staging for 2-4 more
> years doesn't mean anything different from moving it to
> drivers/android/, if I'm still maintaining it, right? What it does say
> is that people rely on this thing, probably you do as well, so let's
> mark it as such.
>
>> If you move it now out of staging into the core kernel it will be considered ABI
>> and getting rid of it can be hard...
>
> It's already considered an "ABI" and removing it is hard, nothing has
> changed there.

Since when is stuff in staging considered ABI?

Thanks,
//richard