Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1759186AbZAVWvE (ORCPT ); Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:51:04 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753934AbZAVWuw (ORCPT ); Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:50:52 -0500 Received: from bombadil.infradead.org ([18.85.46.34]:34603 "EHLO bombadil.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753804AbZAVWuv (ORCPT ); Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:50:51 -0500 Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:50:26 -0500 From: Kyle McMartin To: Greg KH Cc: Dave Jones , Ingo Molnar , Geert Uytterhoeven , Andrew Morton , J?rn Engel , David Brown , Phil Oester , Kay Sievers , Phillip Lougher , Christoph Hellwig , torvalds@linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] Squashfs pull request for 2.6.29 Message-ID: <20090122225025.GA21879@bombadil.infradead.org> Reply-To: kyle@infradead.org References: <20090109211937.GA14342@logfs.org> <20090110124335.GB30744@elte.hu> <20090110165033.GA23943@logfs.org> <20090110101235.7ca24c44.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20090110221528.GA31774@elte.hu> <20090111153920.GC7401@elte.hu> <20090111163018.GA9300@suse.de> <20090122215041.GA29369@redhat.com> <20090122215817.GA27609@suse.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20090122215817.GA27609@suse.de> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 3774 Lines: 84 Playing devil's advocate here... On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 01:58:17PM -0800, Greg KH wrote: > > * The fallout of staging is already starting to drift into distros. > > Within a week of Fedora shipping a kernel that had staging/ > > we had requests to enable drivers from it. > > And of course, those drivers were garbage. > > This is only going to increase as time goes on. > > That's up to you as a distro to handle, not much I can do there. > > But, if you want a recommendation, some of the drivers in staging came > from the Fedora kernel tree, so you should be enabling them :) > Just at76, I think. > What is wrong with it? Bugs are getting fixed, people are getting use > out of their hardware (hell, Linus is even using one of the drivers), > and lots of developers are cutting their teeth on helping out. > Why does it need to be upstream for someone to cut their teeth helping out? > If you don't like it, just disable it in your kernel packages, or > instantly close out the bugs. The drivers in staging has already helped > out some distros by virtue of including newer drivers than they were > mistakenly using at the time (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you...) > > And again, it's helped out users, which is the most important thing > here. > What concerns me is the precedent this sets. If "getting something upstream" now means "getting something into staging" then we've failed our users since there's no longer any motivation for a vendor to invest in all but the most cursory work on a Linux driver. I think we have higher standards to live up to than that. I agree that this is a much better plan than all the distros individually collecting all the shit drivers themselves and (well, for some of them) fixing the most egregious of crap and not getting fixes back upstream because they've all frozen on different versions. But still. (I also think TAINT_CRAP is kind of an insulting name for things which are really Linux-targetted features that just haven't had thorough enough review. Evgeniy Polyakov's work comes to mind... it's really comparing apples to a bunch of festering pieces of turd. While I'm sure he's happy to have gotten his stuff in for more review, is it likely to actually get more review than it would with weekly mailing list postings? Maybe, who am I to say... I do think labelling his work crap by virtue of the directory it resides in is fairly silly.) Yeah, I realize it's fairly hypocritical for me to criticize given I used to work on Ubuntu, but if it makes anyone feel any better, I didn't like the idea of shipping things we wouldn't possibly support there either. While it is nice to justify things as "but users want it" they also don't want a driver that reads files out of /etc and panics their kernel or trashes their data. Which is why we won't enable this in Fedora. We have enough maintenance burden with the utter horrowshow drivers we claim as "maintained" in mainline already. If people really think having something in mainline increases the odds something will get cleaned up, I urge them to look at any scsi, network, or isdn driver from more than five years ago. Make sure you bring a barf bag. In summary, I don't know, this is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't paradoxes. ;-) But if you suck in a driver that barfs all over your filesystem, because it was allowed to be turned in with zero review, are you going to be the one to tell the user "ha ha, sucks to be you?" I sure wouldn't want to be. regards, Kyle -- 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/