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Date:   Mon, 29 Jul 2019 15:07:20 -0700
From:   Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
To:     linux-watchdog@cger.kernel.org
Cc:     Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
        Wim Van Sebroeck <wim@linux-watchdog.org>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Marking legacy watchdog drivers as deprecated / obsolete
Message-ID: <20190729220720.GB5712@roeck-us.net>
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Hi,

we have recently seen a number of changes to legacy watchdog drivers,
mostly surrounding the coding style used some 10+ years ago, but also
fixing minor formatting or coding problems found by static analyzers.
This slowly rises above the level of background noise.

Would it be acceptable to mark all those drivers as deprecated/obsolete,
warn users that the driver should be converted to use the watchdog
subsystem, and that it will otherwise be removed in a later Linux kernel
version ? This would give us an idea which drivers are still in use,
and it would enable us to remove the remaining drivers maybe 5 or 6
releases for now.

Thoughts ?

Guenter