linux devel [was Re: Fedora Core 2 wishlists]

[Michael K. Johnson]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 12:29:53AM +0100, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
> Yes, and he is also responsible for dpt_i2o driver.
> After you left the kernel development, nobody worried to include latest aacraid
> patches in 2.4, yes 2.4!! But for 2.6 inclusion the responsible of it is
> Mark Haverkamp <markh at osdl.org>.
> 
> aacraid was an example, but there are more drivers in the same situation. Mainly
> SCSI, IMO the most critical out there (NET drivers are _very_ well maintained).

Well, for a while SCSI drivers were the only thing people would use for
kernel development, while the IDE tree was in shambles...  So there are
at least the most common drivers working, which should give a path for
the rest.  And we can talk to maintainers.

I'm not quite ready to dispair here.

> HW companies work in the 'tradicional way': they write drivers, then it pass
> to control quality team and later they put it on a web page for rh_YY, suse_XX...
> And it never reaches linux-ZZ-ml. Only if a hacker worry by it, it's included
> into the kernel.

Plenty of vendors were initially annoyed when I asked them why they
thought that something was not good enough for the mainstream kernel,
but was good enough for the Red Hat kernel.  That was a very different
perspective, but that wording also helped get a lot more vendor drivers
more actively maintained upstream because they could see what our
perspective was.  I like to think that I was at least one small part
of helping Intel become the example of near-perfect cooperation that
Dave and Jeff use when describing to other vendors how to work with the
Linux community on network drivers.  (If anyone remembers what the case
was like with the e100 and e1000 drivers a few years back, you'll
realize what an impressive transformation that was -- hats off to
Intel for such a great change.)

michaelkjohnson

 "He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
 Linux Application Development                     -- Ben Franklin
 http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/