A change of approach
It's not that 60+ patches to use kzalloc aren't welcome. Well, actually, yes, it is. They should have been one patch per subsystem -- eg all of drivers/scsi in one patch. All of net/ in one patch. etc.
A better approach for the janitors to take would be to claim *a driver*, and do everything on the todo list to it (as a series of patches, obviously). And fix up things that aren't on the todo list too, when you notice them.
You'll get a lot more experience this way than you will doing more-or-less mechanical substitutions.
Signature · 3 lines
"Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this operating system, but compare it to ours. We can't possibly take such a retrograde step."
G'day Matthew,
Quoted 4 lines · Matthew Wilcox
A better approach for the janitors to take would be to claim *a driver*, and do everything on the todo list to it (as a series of patches, obviously). And fix up things that aren't on the todo list too, when you notice them.
I was just wondering about finding an unmaintained driver. Should we just look for
stuff marked as Orphan in the MAINTAINERS file or is there another/better list/way
to find an un-maintained driver that we shuld be made aware of?
Quoted 2 lines
You'll get a lot more experience this way than you will doing more-or-less mechanical substitutions.
It definatly sounds more fun too.
Darren J
Hi Darren,
Quoted 10 lines
Quoted 4 lines
A better approach for the janitors to take would be to claim *a driver*, and do everything on the todo list to it (as a series of patches, obviously). And fix up things that aren't on the todo list too, when you notice them.
I was just wondering about finding an unmaintained driver. Should we just look for
stuff marked as Orphan in theMAINTAINERSfile or is there another/better list/way
to find an un-maintained driver that we shuld be made aware of?
I don't think that the driver definitely has to be unmaintained in order to be chosen by a kernel janitor. If you pick a driver that is currently maintained, you could do the janitorial work and send a series of patches to the maintainer and to the list. I think a maintainer would appreciate this because somebody does the "dirty work".
Andi
Quoted 6 lines · Andi Drebes
Hi Darren,
Quoted 5 lines
I was just wondering about finding an unmaintained driver. Should we just look for
stuff marked as Orphan in theMAINTAINERSfile or is there another/better list/way
to find an un-maintained driver that we shuld be made aware of?
Better is to find drivers with no entry in the MAINTAINERS file at all ... though that's hard to do reliably. If you announce to K-J that you intend to take on a driver, someone with a bit more experience such as Randy or myself can probably let you know if that driver has a maintainer.
Quoted 5 lines
I don't think that the driver definitely has to be unmaintained in order to be chosen by a kernel janitor. If you pick a driver that is currently maintained, you could do the janitorial work and send a series of patches to the maintainer and to the list. I think a maintainer would appreciate this because somebody does the "dirty work".
That's going to vary by maintainer -- people are funny that way. Definitely have a thick skin if you're going to do this. I know how frustrating it is if you've put in a lot of work cleaning up a driver, only to have the maintainer reject it because "this driver has to work on $otheros too, and they don't have a $foo".
I'm glad you two have taken my frustrated comment in such a positive way. Thanks.
Signature · 3 lines
"Bill, look, we understand that you're interested in selling us this operating system, but compare it to ours. We can't possibly take such a retrograde step."
Hi,
Quoted 5 lines · Matthew Wilcox
Better is to find drivers with no entry in the
MAINTAINERSfile at all ... though that's hard to do reliably. If you announce to K-J that you intend to take on a driver, someone with a bit more experience such as Randy or myself can probably let you know if that driver has a maintainer.
The problem with drivers is that (except for trivial janitorial tasks), you need the hardware to hack on the driver. However, for most of the common hardware today, there are working drivers, correctly maintained. The unmainainted drivers are drivers for specific hardware, or hardware that has become uncommon.
By saying that, I realize that I'm the owner of a SCSI card handled by the advansys driver, which is marked as BROKEN since quite a long time, and I never did anything for the driver. I tried a bit, but it was an awful piece of code, very hard to grasp for someone with absolutely no knowledge of the SCSI stuff.
I saw your recent cleanup and improvements patches, I hope I'll find the time to give them a try. The SCSI card is still in my box, connected to a 10 years old 4x CD burner, which I almost no longer use, since it's so slow compared to more recent CD burners.
Quoted 8 lines
That's going to vary by maintainer -- people are funny that way. Definitely have a thick skin if you're going to do this. I know how frustrating it is if you've put in a lot of work cleaning up a driver, only to have the maintainer reject it because "this driver has to work on $otheros too, and they don't have a $foo".
I'm glad you two have taken my frustrated comment in such a positive way. Thanks.
Thank you for your comment, I think it's a good idea. Like you, I'm not sure that doing mechanical and repetitive changes to the kernel is likely to allow the people doing it to really learn enough to be able to do more serious changes. Working on a specific area is maybe a better idea, as you suggest.
Sincerly,
Thomas
Signature · 7 lines
Thomas Petazzoni - [email protected] http://{thomas,sos,kos}.enix.org - http://www.toulibre.org http://www.{livret,agenda}dulibre.org - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-janitors" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html