Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:35:05 -0400 | From | Theodore Tso <> | Subject | Re: Slow DOWN, please!!! |
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On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 03:57:27AM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > > > We should be discussing how to raise the quality of our work. > > One big problem I see is Linus wanting to merge all drivers regardless > of the quality. > > Linus said in [1]: > "I'd really rather have the driver merged, and then *other* people can > send patches!" > > The problem is that such "other people" do not exist (except perhaps Al) > for non-trivial stuff.
Sure, but that's not cause of the problems that people like DavidN whine about, or problems that frustrate David Miller and/or Ingo Molnar. The problems that cause whining and/or frustration are when changes in core code break other maintainer. That is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT problem from lower-quality device drivers getting merged. In general, those device drivers don't cause problems who don't have the relevant hardware, and worse case, the device driver can just be CONFIG'ed out.
So this is a totally different issue, and whether or not we merge new device drivers, and at what quality level (from "it compiles, ship it!", to every single checkpatch, sparse, and Cristoph Hellwig nitpick has to be addressed *AND* then the submitter has to give a bottle of high-quality alcohol to a Maintainer :-) is completely orthoganal to the question of whether we can, in a King Canute fashion, compel developers from stopping to develop by command them not to send pull requests or by refusing to merge their work into mainline.
If we don't merge their work, and it's really cool features that our end users are demanding, it will just flow into the distros via out-of-tree patches, much like it did during the 2.4/2.5 era. And maybe the current enterprise distro's will try to hold it back, but if end users start saying things like's "We want containers!!" and start voting with their feet to a distro that is willing to merge OpenVZ patches, it doesn't how much we try to tell the tide to stop flowing in. So yes, we can apply some amount of backpressure, but the real challenge is to figure out how we can work smarter and flush out the bugs faster.
- Ted
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