On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 06:10:06PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:On Tue 2009-10-20 14:17:07, John W. Linville wrote:Move the strip ("Starmode Radio IP") driver to drivers/staging. For
several years this driver has only seen API "bombing-run" changes, and
few people ever had the hardware. This driver represents unnecessary
ongoing maintenance for no clear benefit.
This seems like abuse of the staging process.
My mailbox has been filling-up with discussions of using staging like
this for the past few weeks. I'm reasonably certain those threads
were on the public lists.
There's no TODO to say what needs to be fixed. You just don't want to
maintain it. Because there's nothing to fix, noone has reason to patch
it, and the (working, good enough) driver will just be removed.
"ongoing maintenance for no clear benefit" -- that is what is wrong
with it.
It also marks driver as broken when it is not...
I didn't mark it broken, I proposed moving it to staging. As for
whether or not it actually is broken, how do you know?
The drivers in this thread are for pre-802.11 devices -- old ones
(e.g. ISA) at that. If we actually have users that are willing
to maintain them then maybe that is fine. But I don't see the
benefit of maintaining these simply as extra targets for API change
"bombing runs"...
What about removing it in the regular way, that's
Documentation/feature-removal.txt ?
This has been discussed recently as an alternative for unmaintained
drivers. I suspect this is better than adding a note to a file that
no one reads...