Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1759429AbYG3Viw (ORCPT ); Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:38:52 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753059AbYG3Vio (ORCPT ); Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:38:44 -0400 Received: from styx.suse.cz ([82.119.242.94]:60279 "EHLO mail.suse.cz" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752395AbYG3Vin (ORCPT ); Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:38:43 -0400 Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:38:42 +0200 (CEST) From: Jiri Kosina To: Roland Dreier cc: Jonathan Corbet , LKML , Amanda McPherson , Andrew Morton Subject: Re: [PATCH, RFC] A development process document In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <20080729143015.0f79cf37@bike.lwn.net> <20080730145600.7b61a43a@bike.lwn.net> User-Agent: Alpine 1.10 (LNX 962 2008-03-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1282 Lines: 33 On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, Roland Dreier wrote: > I think Linus has said pretty explicitly that he is willing to merge new > low-level hardware drivers at pretty much any stage, as long as they are > obviously self-contained and can't break anything. Well, I think I understand a little bit this fear of merging new driver that "obviously can't break anything" in arbitrary stage od development. See below. > As an example of this, the UVC webcam driver was one of the very last > things merged just before the final 2.6.26 release, very late in the > release cycle. If you have a hardware that hasn't been supported by the previous kernel versions at all, then everything is fine, just no driver is bound to the device, and the device doesn't work. If then -rc9 comes with a shiny new driver for this hardware, it gets autoloaded. If it is buggy, your system crashes. This is regression, right? Nevertheless, I still think that merging new drivers as fast as possible is a good thing (tm). Thanks, -- Jiri Kosina SUSE Labs -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/