Enabling drivers in staging tree in rawhide

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

CCing fedora-kernel

On 08.01.2009 03:49, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Quite a bit of new drivers in
> http://lwn.net/Articles/313730/

Related: I raised the staging problem already in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477927
as rawhide contained the at76 driver as separate patch
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewvc/rpms/kernel/devel/linux-2.6-at76.patch?view=markup
-- but the same driver (with two small changes) also was part of the 
upstream kernel since October/2.6.28-rc as one of the staging drivers:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=99e06e372378c5833a0c60274b645dfb2e4a4b08
(for more details see bug).

That sounds wrong to me, as

- it's duplicated work

- the at76 staging driver from upstream taints the kernel; the driver 
from our patch doesn't.

> The ralink wireless drivers for example would hopefully make the newer 
> EEE PC model would out of the box.  Does it make sense to enable the 
> drivers in staging tree by default and bring more exposure to them 
> atleast via rawhide if not in general releases?

+1 to the "I think providing hardware support in rawhide and then 
removing it  before release would be somewhat user-hostile." comment 
from mjg59.

IOW: Either enable or disable them. I'm unsure myself what to do but I 
tend to say that disabling the whole staging drivers might be the best 
for Fedora (Greg calls himself as "maintainer of crap" for a good reason).

@Davej, Cebbert and Kylem: What's your position on this?

If they are disabled completely in Fedora then I'll nevertheless 
consider to create a "kmod-staging" package for RPM Fusion.

CU
knurd