On Fri, 11 Mar 2011, Mark Brown wrote:

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 08:43:08PM +0100, Thomas Gleixner wrote:

quoted

Sigh, why insist people on working around core code instead of talking
to the responsible maintainers about their problem in the first place?

I don't know if it's the case here but with a lot of the people I speak
to it's because they're used to working on proprietary OSs where there's
no possibility of fixing the core and they haven't yet realised that
this is a possibility.

Good point. If I only knew a way to get this message to those folks
once and forever.

There are several good reasons to avoid working around core code:

 - It's usually simpler and faster as the core code has all the
   necessary information. So that's even an argument which managers
   might understand.

 - Such workarounds, when not caught, tend to spread themself
   magically because driver writers checkout the existing code of
   similar devices and copy/paste/modify^Wuglify them over and over.

 - In the worst case such workarounds make the core maintainence
   harder and in some cases impossible, because they silently imply
   semantics on the core w/o the core maintainer knowing about them.

I'm going to give a talk about that at the collab summit :)

Thanks,

	tglx