Oh.
David, have you ever tried to install Linux on a laptop that has the
external CD-ROM behind a CardBus slot?
I'll give you a hint: it's possible, but not for a average user that just
inserts the CD and hopes to install it. It _can_ be made to work, but it's
painful as hell, compared to just having support for it directly.
I don't think you realize just how painful that can be for installation,
and what a headache it is for distributions. It makes testing a few orders
of magnitude harder, because very few people tend to test the installation
phase, and right now it is very different for different laptops.
In contrast, if it was part of the standard kernel, people would test that
it works correctly every single time they boot up - because there wouldn't
be any special scripts and other installation-time-only issues. See?
So this infrastructure issue is not really a _technical_ issue - it is
solvable. But it _is_ an ease of administration and a validation issue.
> Well: when someone does big changes to kernel (like turning way
> wait-queues are declared), he/she tends to fix all places in linux
> kernel. He/she certainly will break few drivers. Problem with pcmcia
> drivers is that all of them are allways broken this little way. Is
> pcmcia package distributed in form of patches?
The actual breakage is not all that common, and the only people who really
care about that are people who follow development kernels - and they can
usually fix it up by hand. Usually. Not always. But I still think that is
the much smaller problem.
The larger problem by far in my opinion is the extra complexity and
infrastructure that it requires. Which makes sense for PCMCIA to some
degree, because PCMCIA has all the silly rules and can often need
extensive help from user space in the form of configuration information.
But doesn't really make much sense for cardbus (and thus all modern
laptops) that is a pretty clean architecture and wouldn't really need some
of the extra code.
> > I think this is the first time I've ever heard you express interest in
> > kernel support for dynamically configured devices. I'm somewhat
> > unhappy that it sounds like you're encouraging someone else to do it
> > differently.
The issue is one of copyrights - I've heard noises from you where you very
pretty much against any tighter kernel integration. And if there is one
thing I _never_ want to do, that one thing is to use somebody elses code
if that somebody else is not convinced that he wants the code to be used.
Even if the copyright _allows_ me to use other peoples code, I always want
to be extra sure that it's not just about being legally allowed, it's also
about being Ok on a personal level. I've gotten the feeling that you
wouldn't have wanted that..
> Currently, PCMCIA is licensed using MPL. Would it be possible to
> release pcmcia package under _both_ MPL and GPL in future to make
> in-kernel integration easier? [pretty please]
Oh, as far as I'm concerned that would be the perfect schenario. And it's
certainly possible, as long as all current copyright holders agree on it.
Wev'e had other projects with dual copyrights - drivers shared between
Linux and BSD, so this wouldn't even be anything really surprising or new.
Linus
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