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From:   Sven Van Asbroeck <thesven73@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue, 1 Dec 2020 07:41:33 -0500
Message-ID: <CAGngYiVoj4Gpid5W10pJfiE1FWY=294TJ4fE=CDG4=HwH0WrJw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [BUG] SPI broken for SPI based panel drivers
To:     "H. Nikolaus Schaller" <hns@goldelico.com>
Cc:     Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>,
        Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>,
        kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>,
        Discussions about the Letux Kernel 
        <letux-kernel@openphoenux.org>
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On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 4:04 AM H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@goldelico.com> wrote:
>
> Then it should not have been applied to mainline but fully worked out and tested.
>

That would be a reasonable expectation of a product. But Linux
isn't a product, it's a hugely complex, shared system, which may
form the basis of your product. The core maintainers aren't
superhuman, nor do they have access to the 1000s of configurations
and devices where Linux runs or will run. They do their very best,
but if every change had to be 100% tested in every possible
configuration, then few things could ever change, and Linux
would slow down to a snail's pace.

When your product is based on Linux and you pull a newer version
off kernel.org, it's not unreasonable to expect the occasional
breakage. In my case, when I moved from 5.7 to 5.9, some of the
things that broke were my network chip, and most SPI drivers. That
was a bad day, most pulls are trouble-free.

I believe LTSes are more stable than 'stable releases' which are in
turn more stable than RCs. The choice involves a trade-off between
features, security and stability.

When you do run into a breakage, complaining on the mailing list
is good, but posting a fix is better :)

This is my layman's understanding of the situation, I'm just a user
and not a maintainer.

> >
> >>
> >> What should we do?

Hopefully I have some time this week to look into your breakage,
I may get overtaken by someone much more knowledgeable than
me on spi-gpio.