Re: [PATCH 00/14] ppc32: Remove board ports that are no longer maintained

From: Kumar Gala
Date: Fri Jul 29 2005 - 13:14:51 EST



On Jul 29, 2005, at 12:03 PM, Esben Nielsen wrote:



On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Matt Porter wrote:


On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 09:27:41AM -0700, Eugene Surovegin wrote:

On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 12:13:23PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:

Kumar, I thought that we had some volunteers to take care of some

of

those. I know that I still care about ep405, and I'm willing to

maintain

the code.


Well, it has been almost two months since Kumar asked about

maintenance

for this board. Nothing happened since then.

Why is it not fixed yet? Please, send a patch which fixes it. This

is

the _best_ way to keep this board in the tree, not some empty
maintenance _promises_.


When we recover our history from the linuxppc-2.4/2.5 trees we can
show exactly how long it's been since anybody touched ep405.

Quick googling shows that it's been almost 2 years since the last
mention of ep405 (exluding removal discussions) on linuxppc-embedded.
Last ep405-related commits are more than 2 years ago.


I don't follow that reasoning. Even broken drivers(board support files,
whateever) are better than non.

Take ArcNet support forinstance. Clearly it hadn't been used in any 2.6
kernel up until around 2.6.10. It was highly broken (call to
uninitialized function pointer). But I needed it. I fixed it and send
the
patch so it works from 2.6.11 and up. If the driver had been dropped in
the 2.6 series because nobody actively maintained it, I wouldn't have
got
around to fix it at all and was probably forced to use another OS for my
perpose.

But because the driver was still in there and somebody had made sure it
was updated along the changes to the API in the 2.6 kernel, it was easy
for me to fix it although I didn't know so much about the kernel
internals
at that time.

The code will still exist in older kernel releases so if someone needs to bring it up to date they can. We are more than willing to take patches to fix any issues.

Let's be clear. I posted a request several weeks ago in which anyone was free to comment on the various board ports that existed and their maintainership.

- kumar
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