Re: bk pull

[David Mosberger <davidm@napali.hpl.hp.com>]

>>>>> On Wed, 9 Apr 2003 20:38:36 +0100, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> said:

  Christoph> Btw, do you have any plans to push the changes outside
  Christoph> from arch/ia64 and include/asm-ia64/ in the ia64 patch to
  Christoph> Linus? It would be really nice if the ia64 port could be
  Christoph> used with an out-of-the-box kernel.

Boy, what a loaded question!

Sure, I too would like it if the kernel would always build
out-of-the-box, but I don't think it's very realistic.  Even if I
followed Linus's checkins on an hourly basis (no way in hell I'm ever
gonna do that), there is always a chance that he'll accept a patch
that will (perhaps subtly) break non-x86 platforms.

Having said that, I do submit patches to the respective maintainers
quite frequently.  I probably should cc linux-kernel more often so
others can see that.  Anyhow, I think part of the problem is that I'm
simply not willing to spend inordinate amounts of time pushing the
patches (no, maintaining a kernel tree is not much fun and most
definitely underappreciated, so I do want to get some real work done
occasionally).  For example, the sound driver patches have been around
forever, have been submitted multiple times, and each time we get a
"yeah, that looks good, let me work on it" and that's the last thing
we hear.

I think the only two biggies right now are the AGP/DRM changes (which
I'm working on) and the virtual mem_map support.  The latter I haven't
pushed at all so far, mostly because I just haven't had the
time/energy/interest to do so.  Also, I'm always optimistic someone
else comes along to help with the work... ;-)

	--david