Re: [PATCH v3 2/7] drm/tinydrm: Add helper functions

[Daniel Vetter]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2017 at 08:28:16AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> >
> > I definitely don't want that we don't attempt this. But brought from years
> > of experience, I recommend to merge first (with pre-refactoring already
> > applied, but helpers only extracted, not yet at the right spot), and then
> > follow up with. Because on average, there's way too many trees with
> > overloaded maintainers who maybe look at your patch once per kernel
> > release cycle.
> >
> > If you know that backlight and spi isn't one of these areas (anything that
> > goes through takashi/sound is a similar good experience for us on the i915
> > side), then I guess we can try. But then Noralf has already written a few
> > months worth of really great refactoring, and I'm seriously starting to
> > feel guilty for volunteering him for all of this. Even though he seems to
> > be really good at it, and seems to not mind, it's getting a bit silly.
> > Given that I'd say up to Noralf.
> >
> > In short, there's always a balance.
> 
> I don't think we can make a rule for this, it will always depend on the
> code. There is always going to be stuff we put in drm that should go
> elsewhere, and stuff that is elsewhere that drm should use.
> 
> I think however if we do add stuff like this, someone should keep track
> of them and try to make them get further into the kernel. In this case
> I don't think the patches are too insane to keep in drm and refactor up
> later, in other cases I'm sure it'll be lot more obvious (i.e. we could
> make the same argument for chunks of DAL :-)

DAL's not under this exception, since DAL is all about using drm stuff
more (and maybe fixing a few things in drm helpers). My concern here is
only about going outside of drm, where at least sometimes it's just utter
pain to get even the most trivial bits merged. And holding up an entire
driver for that seems silly, hence merge first, try to further refactor
later.

For DAL amd has started to work on things properly, and since Alex is now
drm-misc committer that should all progress reasonably quickly.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch