Hi, On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Hans-Peter Jansen wrote:
Am Mittwoch, 15. Februar 2006 12:29 schrieb Carl-Daniel Hailfinger:
Peter Czanik schrieb:
But if we get back to stone age and support only a smaller subset of drivers, and a lot others will just go away, as the main selling point: easy installation and exceptional hardware support just go away.
This only affects a *small* subset of ISDN and DSL cards and exactly one wireless chipset (atheros). I fully expect that the GPL driver
The only wireless chipset/pci card, which handles wpa encryption - cool. Especially, since a SuSE colleague actively recommended such cards: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=104662#c2
for the wireless chipset will soon be stable enough to be shipped with the media and that the ISDN case can be completely resolved with GPL drivers if you don't need analog modem emulation. That means the only with a possible support problem are the Fritz-DSL cards (I don't have enough information about these). [...]
So let's summarize: Short-term changes: Less WLAN/ISDN/DSL cards supported out of the box. Long-term changes: Less DSL cards supported out of the box.
You're expressing an attitude here that may be adequate for an independent kernel developer, but cannot be accepted by a serious product manager for a product with such a wide propagation.
This is in no way an exceptable solution for anybody owning any of these pieces. Imagine - some companies I advised SUSE Linux - depend on a e.g. working fax solution. Sure, 10.1 disqualifies in this discipline.
I don't believe, that AVM will/is able to provide any userspace solution for ISDN fax emulation in the 10.1 timeframe. AFAICS, there's even a framework missing - if possible at all - which would allow this and meet the tight timing requirement of such a task.
IOW, if a customer asks me for an upgrade of his SUSE and Fritzcard!PCI based fax solution, I have to tell him, that he has to buy an expensive AVM B1 card and throw away the old one, what do you think they will reply to me?
Personally, I think this is entirely acceptable since it reduces support load on SUSE kernel developers (less tainted oopses) and respects the express will of the kernel developing community.
Sure, disappointing customers definitely reduces the support load in every company. Such an attitude will actively damage the reputation of SUSE and you know - one disappointed customer has much more weight (and will spread the word louder) than ten satisfied ones.
I will prepare a wiki page about the topic so that we can point to it for future flamewars. Suggested title is "New driver architecture". Comments?
How about "New driver architecture - Novells disaster seekers strike back"
At all, a very good statement. Let's hope Novell has success with their help offer to the driver vendors. It is Novell's own interest, not that of the driver vendors... Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)