From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Miller Subject: Re: Please pull 'upstream-rtl8187' branch of wireless-2.6 Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 04:36:12 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <20070510.043612.112287450.davem@davemloft.net> References: <46425564.3040505@garzik.org> <200705092216.26880.flamingice@sourmilk.net> <200705101323.41310.mb@bu3sch.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: flamingice@sourmilk.net, jeff@garzik.org, linville@tuxdriver.com, netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org To: mb@bu3sch.de Return-path: Received: from 74-93-104-97-Washington.hfc.comcastbusiness.net ([74.93.104.97]:49165 "EHLO sunset.davemloft.net" rhost-flags-OK-FAIL-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757562AbXEJLgJ (ORCPT ); Thu, 10 May 2007 07:36:09 -0400 In-Reply-To: <200705101323.41310.mb@bu3sch.de> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org From: Michael Buesch Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 13:23:40 +0200 > Nah, Jeff. Please don't go this path. > If we have to remove all magic numbers from drivers, we'd have to either > *) Drop reverse engineered drivers like bcm43xx completely. > *) Clutter them with completely useless defines such as > #define RADIO_UNKNOWN97A_REG 0x97A > > Better leave such magic registers/values in the code as-is > and probably convert them to good defines later, if reverse engineering > found out the meaning. That's what I'm doing for bcm43xx and it makes > a _whole_ lot more sense. One good point I'd like to bring up is that someone reading this code might not know any of this. If you use a macro name that says it's a register you don't know the meaning of, that's information and useful information at that. This isn't for you, it's for other people reading the driver. If you are suddenly unable to do any work on the driver at all, the more information you leave around the better even if it seems trite and useless to you.