[Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] How can we treat staging drivers better?
Takashi Iwai
tiwai at suse.de
Wed Sep 5 14:03:50 UTC 2018
On Wed, 05 Sep 2018 15:55:28 +0200,
Dan Carpenter wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 03:35:53PM +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > The staging driver is a wonderful process to promote the downstream
> > code to the upstream, but I have doubt whether it's working really as
> > expected for now.
> >
> > - Often the drivers live forever in staging although they should have
> > been moved to the upper, properly maintained, subsystems.
>
> The only one that comes to mind is comedi. I think those guys know that
> everyone is fine with them moving the code.
>
> Do you have another example?
Well, not forever, but many codes remain there for many cycles, I
thought. But I haven't counted and no statistics, so it might be my
false impression.
> > - Code changes in staging are mostly only scratching surfaces, minor
> > code style cleanups, etc, what checkpatch suggests.
>
> That's probably true for the wireless drivers because converting them
> to use mac80211 is complicated. The other drivers seem to be doing
> better.
So which drivers were the good examples? Maybe we can learn from
them.
> > - There are little communications with the corresponding subsystem;
> > already a few times I was surprised by casually finding a staging
> > driver code by grepping for preparing API changes.
>
> Which ones are you interested in?
My primary interest is the sound stuff.
> I'd always prefer to hand off staging
> drivers to an existing subsystem but it's not always clear who that
> should be.
IMO, *that* is the problem -- no proper taker in the subsystem.
thanks,
Takashi
More information about the Ksummit-discuss
mailing list