On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 08:54 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
And no, I don't have all the hardware at all, that's impossible. I've written drivers for devices where I have never seen the hardware, and they work just fine (or so I'm told.) Having the hardware, or even access to it is not a requirement at all to do development and/or maintenance.
Given that you want to be absolutely certain you didn't break it you effectively need to retest. But obviously once again we are serving and relying on hordes of Joe Random Hackers that will retest the driver and report. Single regression for 'normal' user would probably render the whole thing useless.
So most certainly maintenance is not done. And actually, most of the testing effort done against the original driver was just rendered useless with the API tweak.
No, not at all. That's just not how the Linux kernel development process works, sorry. I can go into the whole testing process if you really want to know, but that has nothing to do with the change of APIs.
Well, duh. Of course any change, API or otherwise, can trigger a regression. And the regressions make it sure real life John/Jane Does fail using Linux. I use the word 'regression' because 99.999% of all imaginable things have used to work in some version of Linux..
I find it odd that people who do not have experience in doing Linux kernel development and API changes would insist that the current model we are using is broken...
No no, you got this all wrong. I'm not saying I know a better solution - far from it. All I'm trying to say is that current model does *not* serve _regular_ users. Linux is a hacker tool for hackers. That's what the topic was all about.
No, not at all. You should be able to drop in a new kernel just fine, with only minor package updates at times.
Joe Random Hacker can, regular user can't.
rpm -ihv new_kernel_package.rpm
zypper install new_kernel_package.rpm
You really can't be serious here. Now, please explain in detail what regular user would do if that left him/ her without a working kernel. This happens at least once per month to me. Not a single IT department on this whole planet would allow you to reinstall kernel to get one bloody driver update. It usually takes gazillion geeks to fix the regressions that show'd up. This costs some serious money. Really.
or use some gui tool. People do it all the time. And they help us out with testing in ways that we developers can not do. So yes, "regular user" can do this, and they do, every single day.
You obviously have very different view of 'regular user' than the rest of us. John/Jane Doe can NOT help you debug a kernel. Nor does he/she wish to. Heck, she doesn't even know what kernel IS.
That, and I don't think SUSE would be too happy supporting 2.6.23.14 for SLED10 either. Andreas, would you be happy with it :) ?
But we do support it for openSuSE, right?
Your point being? Not even SuSE can commit to making new kernels work on SLED (and that's even relatively new distribution). Now, how precisely you think regular users could do it? Let's stick the topic to get John/Jane Doe to Linux.
So, in the "real life" it isn't a load of bollocks, sorry :)
OK, try asking your auntie to do the same thing ;)
My anutie doesn't run RHEL3, she's smarter than that :)
So she's reinstalling openSuSE twice per year ;) ? -- // Janne -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org