On Wednesday 18 February 2009 01:08:23 Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:23:27 +0100
>
> Jean Delvare <kh...@linux-fr.org> wrote:
> > Hi Mauro,
> >
> > These days I am helping Hans Verkuil convert the last users of the
> > legacy i2c device driver binding model to the new, standard binding
> > model. It turns out to be a very complex task because the v4l-dvb
> > repository is supposed to still support kernels as old as 2.6.16, while
> > the initial support for the new i2c binding model was added in kernel
> > 2.6.22 (and even that is somewhat different from what is upstream now.)
> > This forces us to add quirks all around the place, which will surely
> > result in bugs because the code becomes hard to read, understand and
> > maintain.
> >
> > In fact, without this need for backwards compatibility, I would
> > probably have been able to convert most of the drivers myself, without
> > Hans' help, and this would already be all done. But as things stand
> > today, he has to do most of the work, and our progress is slow.
> >
> > So I would like you to consider changing the minimum kernel version
> > supported by the v4l-dvb repository from 2.6.16 to at least 2.6.22.
> > Ideal for us would even be 2.6.26, but I would understand that this is
> > too recent for you. Kernel 2.6.22 is one year and a half old, I
> > honestly doubt that people fighting to get their brand new TV adapter
> > to work are using anything older. As a matter of fact, kernel 2.6.22 is
> > what openSUSE 10.3 has, and this is the oldest openSUSE product that is
> > still maintained.
> >
> > I understand and respect your will to let a large range of users build
> > the v4l-dvb repository, but at some point the cost for developers seems
> > to be too high, so there's a balance to be found between users and
> > developers. At the moment the balance isn't right IMHO.
>
> In my case, I use RHEL 5.3 that comes with 2.6.18. I need at least to
> have compatibility until this version, otherwise it will be harder to me
> to test things, since most of the time I need to run RHEL 5 kernel.
>
> I know that other developers also use RHEL 5 on their environments.
Why should we have ugly and time consuming workarounds in our repository
that hamper progress just to allow you to run RHEL 5? I'm sorry, that's no
reason at all. I very much doubt other subsystem maintainers are stuck on
2.6.18.
And anyway, there is no way you can do proper testing against the new i2c
API on that old kernel. The loading and probing of i2c modules is quite
different, so that's never representative of what kernels >= 2.6.22 do.
Regards,
Hans
--
Hans Verkuil - video4linux developer - sponsored by TANDBERG
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