From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753904Ab0CEPkt (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Mar 2010 10:40:49 -0500 Received: from earthlight.etchedpixels.co.uk ([81.2.110.250]:53157 "EHLO www.etchedpixels.co.uk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752506Ab0CEPks (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Mar 2010 10:40:48 -0500 Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 15:42:01 +0000 From: Alan Cox To: David Miller Cc: daniel@fooishbar.org, skeggsb@gmail.com, airlied@linux.ie, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org, dri-devel@lists.sf.net, mingo@elte.hu, torvalds@linux-foundation.org Subject: Re: [git pull] drm request 3 Message-ID: <20100305154201.4885c9c2@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> In-Reply-To: <20100305.072612.186421758.davem@davemloft.net> References: <20100305123834.0d9c6277@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> <20100305.063718.211238119.davem@davemloft.net> <20100305151754.GB2505@tempa> <20100305.072612.186421758.davem@davemloft.net> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.7.4 (GTK+ 2.18.6; x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > Personally I wouldn't have ever committed to that "user visible APIs > can break cause it's in -stable." Because that's complete garbage Staging has to have the no API rules. Read some of the stuff in there to understand why or apply about 30 seconds of thought to what it would mean to you. There are staging drivers using old wireless layers. If you say that no API can be broken from staging then you will have to put the old wireless compatibility into your network code forever. Does that fill you with joy, light and happiness ? Whether nouveau should ever have gone into staging is a different question. I don't personally think its all as clear cut as it might seem. Quite a few distributions ship whacky wireless drivers with old API's as the choice is that or nothing. They manage the user expectation and they deal with the drivers moving from one wireless stack to the other and mostly successfully hide it in userspace. The differences here appear to be - Having no video is more annoying than having no wireless - Userspace failed to hide it (so maybe its not a kernel ABI problem but a failure to anticipate the need for versioned libdrm and the importance in some eyes of supporting the kernel.org kernel - which like it or not is a corner case for distro *users*). - The box it broke happened to belong to Linus but that doesn't really require tantrums or fingerpointing to fix, particularly when its only the combination of a set of decisions and misunderstandings by Linus, Fedora and the Nouveau developers together that combined to create the mess. Alan