netdev - Re: Kill I4L?

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Message-ID: <20150209194813.180e54ae@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Date:	Mon, 9 Feb 2015 19:48:13 +0000
From:	One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To:	Tilman Schmidt <tilman@...p.cc>
Cc:	Bas Peters <baspeters93@...il.com>,
	Karsten Keil <kkeil@...ux-pingi.de>,
	Paul Bolle <pebolle@...cali.nl>, Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com>,
	Sergei Shtylyov <sergei.shtylyov@...entembedded.com>,
	"isdn@...ux-pingi.de" <isdn@...ux-pingi.de>,
	Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@...6.fr>,
	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Kill I4L?

> The reason is the maintenance load it produces. There's a continuous,
> annoying trickle of patch  proposals, discussions, conflicts with
> development in other, still actively maintained areas of the kernel,
> and so on. The present discussion being a point in case.
> 
> > Does it hurt anyone to leave the code in there, despite it barely 
> > being used?
> 
> Yes it does. Not much, but the pain is increasing over the years.
> Every time someone tries to touch that code there's the problem
> that no one can actually answer for it, much less test anything.

The same has been happening with a lot of other code. For i2o I've
followed the pattern a few other drivers have used. I sent GregKH a patch
to move it into staging, and if nobody steps up then it will vanish in a
few releases.

> > We're not talking about a particularly huge driver here, either.
> 
> But one that's particularly difficult to maintain, without
> providing any noticeable benefit in return.

I'm also not sure a pretty, polished and untested driver is actually
better than someone who needs it going back to an old tree and a known
working driver to forward port.

Alan
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