It's messages like that that really bring out the lurkers...
Ahem. Well, since Palm development would be impossible for me without
IrDA, I'll keep downloading it. I always did with PCMCIA.
You know, the kernel tarball is getting ridiculously big, anyway. I
already can't compile it on my old laptop without carving it into little
pieces. There may soon come a time when the kernel is distributed in
several files. (In fact that's already the case, sort of, since if you
only upgrade your kernel once in a while you'll probably need to download
several userspace tools and so on at the same time, anyway.)
I would enjoy seeing the first part of kernel configuration being just
downloading the bits that you're going to use. I have no reason to
download S/390 code or PPC or Sparc or Raid or USB or ...
It would be interesting if there were an "irda" directory on kernel.org.
Likewise a "pcmcia" directory, and so on. Maybe "components/irda" or
similar.
This won't solve the problem of "getting IrDA into 2.4." I think that
phrase is just equivalent to "being blessed by holy penguin spit", anyhow.
If it's working in a given kernel, I'll use it. (It doesn't need to be in
2.4.0, anyway. 2.4.10 would be fine. No hurry, and of course the issue
is different for distros.)
How about submitting a patch to LKML and Linus that _removes_ irda (not
completely, just get rid of the broken code and leave the infrastructure).
That way nobody will even try to use the code that's in the tree. Put
instructions in Configure.help. It's not unheard of -- there are already
many places that say "This turns this feature on, but to actually use it
you'll need stuff from ...". With any luck, this sort of thing could
catch on, and we'll start seeing other bits removed from the main tarball.
I say, don't think of IrDA as a "patch". It's an "optional component".
In fact it would be cool if it were distributed as a tarball that you
merely unpack in /usr/src/linux (or /usr/src, with one tree each for the
kernel bits and the userspace). Patches are for fixing one-liners.
No penguin spit required.
P.S. I'm way too chicken to cc: LKML on this. Somebody else do it.
Dr. Tom Holroyd
"I am, as I said, inspired by the biological phenomena in which
chemical forces are used in repetitious fashion to produce all
kinds of weird effects (one of which is the author)."
-- Richard Feynman, _There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom_
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