We've put procedures in place. Its called *SOURCE CODE*. The NCR 5380 for
example is the most godawful pile of crud scsi controller on the planet. Its
old while good for its time nowdays is a joke.
Because we have this *SOURCE CODE* stuff it still works in Linux 2.3.30pre6
and people have extended it to support other platforms. So its extensible,
its adaptable
Its also *maintainable* which is the most important item of all. I can take a
bug report and look at the controller source and say "ok thats a driver bug".
> as something against binary portable drivers. Pure source drivers are
> adversely affected by compiler compatibilty concerns, and unless the
> user is bulding the updated sources with the *exact* same compiler
> revision and kernel source code, you don't really have any idea
> whether it will work. It should work, but how many times have you
Which you can package in with the build rules. They do dependancies. You can
do a compiler dependancy. Debian for example pacakages gcc 2.7.2.3 for the
same reasons you give. Not a problem.
> Sure I would like to see binary portable drivers in the Linux kernel
> so we can better support our products (of which some don't fit at all
Feel free to take the source tree, build a binary only compatible environment
and distribute it. Just keep to the GPL terms and don't expect anyone in
the mainstream community to do anything with bug reports versus it but bounce
them to you
> > No NE2K vendor ever submitted some for evaluation and testing to
> > my knowledge. If you look at tier1 you'll generally see products
> > that vendors are shipping now and care about. NE2000 clones are
> > something vendors shipped and have no desire to do any more with
> > other than their customer obligations. It doesnt help their bottom
> > line.
>
> What has this got to do with vendors? NE2000 compatible boards are
Vendors submit cards for testing to vendors. Certification is a vendor
issue.
> Imagine how bad the compatibile of XFree86 would be if no-one
> bothered to ensure that the latest servers work properly on the old
> S3 Vision chipsets? You can be sure no-one at S3 wants to help
> support those boards, because they would much rather upgrade you to a
> Savage2000. But developers on the XFree86 list have those boards, and
> do reguarly test them to ensure backwards compatibility.
And because they have *source code* they can fix them too. What good is
"it doesnt work, oh shit" to the X people.
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