Re: 2.1.123 and fbcon.c

Geert Uytterhoeven (Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)
Tue, 29 Sep 1998 10:10:04 +0200 (CEST)

On Mon, 28 Sep 1998, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Sep 1998, Kurt Garloff wrote:
> > And you think it's a good idea to have the linux community divide into to
> > parts: The Linus party and the VGER party?
>
> No. I've tried to tell the vger people that.
>
> The problem is that some people think that once they are in vger, they're
> golden and no longer have to worry. Those kinds of people I don't care
> about, I don't want to hear about, and I refuse to discuss with.
>
> David Miller spent an inordinate amount of time in getting the crap out of
> vger. That's good. He then sent me patches to sync up the parts he thought
> were fine. That's even better.

Right. And he left drivers/video for Martin and me.

> The problem is that there's a ton of patches on vger, and some people do
> not understand the issue of "Code Freeze". They think that just because
> they had access to the CVS tree, they got under the code freeze somehow. I
> won't bother educating them any more.

If `Code Freeze' means we are not allowed to sent fixes for non-Intel
platforms, then there's something wrong, IMNSHO.

Remember that you didn't want to integrate the abstract console driver and the
support for frame buffer devices until 2.1.107. Before that, all non-Intel
architectures were using different graphical console drivers. No one wanted
to work on converting their drivers to frame buffer devices before frame buffer
devices were accepted in 2.1.107. That was the well-known `chicken and egg'
problem.

Of course this created a bunch of patches for the other architectures after
2.1.107! And 2.1.107 is just 3 months ago.

And now all those different graphical console drivers are gone. Frame buffer
devices are used on m68k, AXP, PPC, ARM, SPARC, MIPS (and even on Intel; any
other architectures left?).

> I'm still open to bug fixes, but they had better not be "go look at vger,
> some of the stuff there is bug-fixes". Anybody who thinks that that kind
> of approach works is pretty misguided.

IIRC Martin Mares sent you a patch for drivers/video lately, which was not
accepted. If this didn't happen, please forget what I said and please accept my
apologies.

I put up a patch for drivers/video between the official 2.1.123 and the current
vger tree at

http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/bin/native-2.1.123-vger-19980929-video.diff.gz

Linus, you will get a private copy in your mailbox.

I don't know whether it will compile or work. I don't care whether it will
compile or work. 2.1.123 doesn't compile neither, so it doesn't matter. At
least it will get closer to working. It shouldn't make any difference for you
guys who run with CONFIG_FB=n.

It's not a `hundred-megabyte patch', only 701492 bytes.

Greetings,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven                     Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be
Wavelets, Linux/{m68k~Amiga,PPC~CHRP}  http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/
Department of Computer Science -- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven -- Belgium




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