TI BQ242xx Battery Charger Development/Consolidation Plans

Not too long I ago started working on a new driver called bq242xx_charger.c that will add support for TI's BQ24250, BQ24251, BQ24261M, and BQ24262 Li-Ion battery charger/power-path management ICs and that work is about 50% done. I chose a working name of bq242xx_charger.c in the hopes that in addition to providing immediate support for said devices that this driver can later be used as a platform to add other devices of the BQ242xx sub-family in an effort to re-use/consolidate and help keep drivers/power organized.

Long story short I also realized that we just got a new bq24257_charger.c driver (for the BQ24257) already in the Linux 4.2 tree which creates somewhat of a conflict with the bq242xx_charger.c work in progress.

I would like to solicit ideas/comments regarding the following plan of attack:

- Continue bq242xx_charger.c development as scoped in the first paragraph
- Work on getting it accepted into upstream
- As future work, absorb the already existing bq24257_charger.c driver into the bq242xx_charger.c driver, and deprecate its usage

There might be a potential risk for user confusion for a transitional time if somebody was just looking at the filenames to select their driver due to part number overlap. However I argue folks are more likely to go the Kconfig route to select their driver so this may not be a problem after all.

Thanks!

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Andreas Dannenberg Texas Instruments Inc.