Hi, On Mon, Dec 14, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
One of our policies regarding kernel updates is that we'll fix bugs pertaining to usability until the next release. Otherwise, it's security, data loss/corruption, and system crash fixes until EOL. While it could be argued that hardware enablement falls under usability, we haven't treated it that way in the past.
Well, that depends on your definition of "past" :)
I'd like to revisit that.
[...]
The particular driver I was asked about is completely standalone. I don't have a problem including it since it won't affect anything else.
So just go ahead. You will not hurt anybody, but chances are you will make some people happy.
The issue was that I don't want to encourage the expectation that this would be a normal occurrence - unless we want to change the policy surrounding updates.
Making people happy is a good thing.
I should be clear on what I have in mind and what the limitations are. I do not intend to open the door for every crap driver that's floating around out there. There are reasons that the drivers aren't in the mainline kernel and I have no interest in duplicating that debate on this list. Drivers up for post-release inclusion _must_ be already in the mainline kernel.
There was a time (in the real past) when users chose the SuSE kernel over mainline because it supported much more hardware...
The other limitation is that the changes be completely standalone or isolated such that it's apparent that the introduction of the change doesn't affect the stability of users who are using those drivers already. That part can get sticky since adding a PCI ID is easy, but adding handling that is needed to enable that PCI ID while potentially affecting other devices in a clean way is not.
This limitation is understandable.
So with that, I'd like to open it up for discussion. I've cross-posted between opensuse-factory and opensuse-kernel since it's a policy that affects everyone, not just those interested in the kernel itself.
-Jeff
Hubert "using the out-of-mainline lirc driver since years" Mantel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org