I donnot want to run into the details that motivated this thread, but I
want to say that, in my opinion, you donnot deserve the criticisms I read
against you. A simple multiplication let me imagine your hard work for
maintaining your drivers. May-be the reasons are that Linus is
under-estimating the work that is actually needed for such a maintainance.
Pushing a driver bug to the kernel mainstream is catastrophic in terms of
time wasted for the maintainer and for users as well, given the number of
Linux users that try latest kernels. Delaying patches for the kernel
mainstream help delivering better stuff and I am sure it is your
intention.
For a bug in the kernel, there is a army of volonteers that try to help,
but for a driver bug, the maintainer is mostly left alone and sometimes
unfairly accused. At least, it has been my observations.
By the way, we are using your drivers for years and have been quite
happy of their great quality. Many, many thanks, Donald, for your great
work.
Gérard.
On Wed, 20 Oct 1999, Donald Becker wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Oct 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> > Indeed. It would be helpful for Donald as well if he didn't try to
> > maintain tens of patches outside the official kernel tree.
> ..
> > Donald is not the maintainer as far as I am concerned...
>
> In August you rejected all of the then-current updates because they had
> visible support for multiple kernel-support. You wanted all backwards
> compatibility code removed. Based on that I spent several weeks changing and
> testing over a dozen PCI drivers so that the base versions had support for
> 2.3 only. Now those are changes are rejected.
>
> I spend more than half of my working time working on Linux drivers,
> including the time consuming, boring work of answering email and tracking
> down usually-spurious bug reports. I've done it in a way that minimizes the
> your workload, and makes the updates and new drivers immediately available
> to those with stable kernels. And now I find out that you don't consider
> me to be involved with the Linux kernel work. (Well, at least that explains
> my status with the RedHat IPO.)
>
>
> Donald Becker
> Scyld Computing Corporation, and
> USRA-CESDIS, becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
>
>
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