Re: Moving sound/* to drivers/ ?

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Thu, 22 May 2008 01:53:06 +0200,
Rene Herman wrote:
> 
> On 22-05-08 01:37, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> 
> > Speaking as a former OSS driver maintainer, I always preferred 
> > drivers/sound.
> > 
> > Though Rene's suggestion (use both sound/ and drivers/sound/) might make 
> > sense if the subsystem code is huge -- I supported the drivers/block/ -> 
> > block/ code movement for example.
> 
> Well, not _huge_ but ALSA is very much structured like that; large 
> middle layer with "miniport" drivers (I do by the way expect this was 
> also Takashi plan originally due to him using sound/* and not just 
> "sound/"; that is, I took the * to be shorthand for isa, pci, usb and so on)

Well, no, I originally thought moving all $LINUX/sound to
$LINUX/drivers/sound.  The sound core stuff is already in sound/core,
so it can be peacefully in drivers/sound/core, just like other drivers
like USB, V4L, etc.

>  From a structural view, the PCM core is just as much not a driver as 
> the IP protocol isn't one and moving all of sound/ to drivers/ would 
> trade the current "why are the drivers not under drivers/?" issue for a 
> "why is all this non-driver code under drivers/?".
> 
> This "net model" of sound/ and drivers/sound/ would be cleanest I feel.

I think it's a question of the balance.  The net stuff is huge, 10
times more codes than the sound core.

An argument for keeping the sound core in /sound is that this is used
not only by sound drivers but also by some video drivers.


Takashi