On Fri, 16 May 2008, Darren J Moffat wrote:

> Cyril Plisko wrote:
>> On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 11:49 PM, Garrett D'Amore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> I'm wondering, what thought has anyone seriously given to the notion of
>>> "shrinking" ON?
>>
>> +1
>>
>> One of the things to spin off can be device drivers (I believe that
>> idea was discussed in the past already). It could serve number of
>> purposes - shrinking ON, keeping all the drivers DDI clean (since they
>> will be outside of the ON) and making it easy for different
>> distributions to update drivers.
>
> Where would they spin off into ?
>
> Not being in ON doesn't automatically make the DDI clean they can still
> use non DDI functions - it just means they might break when someone
> changes one of them (where as when in ON they would be more likely to
> get fixed).
>
> All device drivers ?

Argh. Blanket "thou shalt <not> ..." is bad.

>
> Just some of them ?

And now for the nitty-gritty details.

>
> Why device drivers ?  What is so special about them ?  How is ON holding
> them back from development ?  Or how are they holding ON back ?

Not necessarily holding back development - but sometimes maintenance.

Having a separate driver gate means you _can_, if you so choose, write 
your driver that the same module works fine on, say, S9, S10, onnv, ... 
hence only ever creating _one_ release of it.

No backporting, synchronous patch releases.

sounds too good to be true.

FrankH.

>
> BTW we should probably be having this discussion on on-discuss@ instead.

Agreed.
FrankH.
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