Re: Staging, place holder for better company/community development model

["Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 11:14:56PM -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
>> A lot of people really hate the staging tree.
>
> They do?  I've not gotten any complaints that I can remember about it.

Heh.......

>> I don't but let me tell you why and I'd like to see if you concur with
>> these particular concrete use cases and ideas on how to further use
>> it.
>>
>> The ath9k driver came to many as a big surprise -- and since it was a
>> surprise we had to do the work ourselves as a team at Atheros in
>> closed doors, without the community's involvement until we got
>> something standing up and not smelling as bad. Our own change in
>> direction to work on things upstream can be seen later as well by the
>> release of the 11n Otus driver and documentation provided to
>> interested developers to port it to mac80211 (not to mention similar
>> type of work for ath5k) -- Johannes quickly then ported it and created
>> the ar9170 11n USB driver which is its replacement for otus and
>> targeted for wireless-testing. Otus is currently part of the staging
>> tree. While ar9170 has no 802.11n support users wishing to test 11n
>> USB with an open driver can use the "vendor" driver. The idea is to
>> minimize as time goes by the "port" effort and get things out to the
>> community faster.
>>
>> With future devices we may want to create a better path for
>> integration into upstream drivers. But I also want users to get
>> support for the devices as soon as those devices hit shelves in the
>> market, maybe even before. So I would like to think of staging not
>> only as a place for people to put drivers which a company has no
>> resources to do the right job but also perhaps to _do_ the actual port
>> work _with_ the community together.
>
> This is already happening today, with at least two different network
> drivers, so I have no objection to this at all.

Oh nice, which ones and what companies if you can say.

>> By doing so we get devices supported with whatever ugly piece of code
>> makes the device run (as long as its open, upstreamble, etc) but we
>> also can engage with the community on the actual engineering and
>> future of the actual driver we do want to support in Linux.
>>
>> As time goes by hopefully staging will not be necessary as companies
>> (like ours) will have an immediate well defined structure for their
>> drivers to easily add support for further devices.
>
> Sounds fine to me.
>
>> If we should take this approach -- should we send patches for wireless
>> staging to John, or Greg? It would still be "crap" so I don't expect
>> John to accept to help maintain crap but what if its crap with a clear
>> defined path to un-crap land?
>
> I'll gladly take them, no objections from me.

Alright nice, will bounce this internally now.

   Luis