Re: [2.6 patch] the overdue eepro100 removal

Bill Davidsen wrote:

Adrian Bunk wrote:

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On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 12:01:56PM -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
  

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Please do not make unnecessary kernel changes which require changes in our 
systems.

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If you think the e100 driver fixes your problems use it and be happy. But 
since you don't have to test system behavior with the new driver, and you 
won't be called at night or on weekends if it doesn't work, do the rest of 
the world a favor and stop taking out things we know to work! Leaving in 
the eepro100 causes no work for you, and even if e100 works perfectly it 
needs to be validated in any sane network. it still makes work.
    

The goal is to get e100 better, and removing eepro100 helps with 
reaching this goal.
  

That's *your* goal, it should not be a shock that users have a goal of 
using their systems without having to reconfigure them every time 
there's a kernel upgrade containing a security fix.

unfortunately it is impossible for anyone to patch *every* old version of an OS 
there is. Not only do we not want to do this (too much work, little return), but 
most of the times it is exponentially more difficult to fix a security bug in an 
older OS version than a new one.

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Why didn't _you_ try the e100 driver when you validated your systems 
after you upgraded them to kernel 2.6, and if you did and it didn't 
work, where is your bug report?
  

Is that a joke, or subtle irony? Do you generally validate drivers you 
don't use just because your hardware might be able to support them? I 
don't validate various accelerated video drivers on systems running 
mostly text console, never check sound options on systems with an audio 
application, etc. After I tried the e100 driver on the first few systems 
and found issues (which may be resolved by now) I went back to eepro100 
and used what worked. And used the driver for any new systems in other 
installs.

If there were any benefit to removing a working driver I would at least 
be able to see it as a resources issue, but as far as I can see you just 
seem to have a personal preference for the e100 driver and want to force 
others to use it because you are so much better able to decide what 
users need than the system administrators. That's one of the reasons 
people choose open source, because they have a choice, and can use 
what's best for them.

as discussed before we really want to avoid having (1) an unmaintained 
bitrotting driver for X and (2) one that should work because people are being 
paid to take care of it.

The community has always encouraged us to work with us fixing the last issues in 
e100 to make it work for everyone. After all, we have all the documentation and 
facilities here to do almost all of the work.

I asked Adrian to postpone removing the eepro100 driver since we know that e100 
is still not working on some platforms. However, if e100 is not working on your 
specific platform, then I would certainly like to know about your problem, and 
whether it still exists. This is orthogonal to your argument: Your complaint 
stands (and eepro100 will not be removed until we address the ARM platform 
issues), but I ask you kindly to work with us and test the current e100 driver 
and report any issues to us.

Cheers,

Auke