On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 03:18:07PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 03:02:46PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > > > Anything else is a maintainance nightmare in the long term. > > > > Sure, but it provides for localized testing before large scale > > deployement later on. > > Shouldn't a distribution kernel by production and not testing of random > changes?
Which is why we have a (rather long) development and testing phase, don't we ? That is what dbeian/unstabvle is for. > > BTW, did you review asfs and the orinco patch properly before including? No, naturally not, Well, the orinoco patch is from Jens, so i will have him respond on this, but for the asfs driver, i had contact with both the author of the patch and the author of the SFS filesystem, as well as the whole SFS user community. Still i included it, in the current state, because i know damn well that if i didn't, the whole pegasos user community would rather build their own kernel, like they do for powermac, rather than use the prebuilt kernel, which means i don't get feedback on other issues on this subarch. So you see, there are a lot of considerations apart from just the pure quality issues. Also, let me give an anecdote. When i first took over the powerpc maintenance from Dan, i was no way a kernel expert, but nobody else bothered so i decided to launch myself in this, i made a mistake and compiled a kernel which would not boot on powermac. Weeks passed before anyone even noticed, and then i got feedback from only a few persons. Any calls for testing on powermacs at that time had mostly gone unanswered, let alone on non pmac subarches or oldworld. It took time, month even, to get to the point we are now, were there is a package that is actually also used by the users, but i guess most of our feedback still comes from the debian-installer. > I haven't seen you as either filesystem or network driver experts on > linux lists. Note that this is not a personal attack, I'm no net driver > expert either and wouldn't claim I alone could review such a driver. Well, i am not a kernel expert. I believe i am an expert in debian packaging though, which probably makes me today more adequate than you to do the job. But ideally we should work together, and not try to despise the job done by the other because it is not the way it should be. > I am familar with filesystem drivers thouch and asfs doesn't pass a > review. Information on what needs changing and even patches are welcome :) > This is one more reason I'd like to see a maintaince team instead of > gazillions of arch maintainers in their own small tower and let as > much work as possible upstream. Well, as you see, the powerpc package is now maintained by a small team, namely Jens and me. > The kernel is a very complex piece of software, and there's very few if > any people understanding all parts good enough to make educated decisions > whether a change is okay or not. Yeah, but i believe it is not only a question of understanding the kernel, but there is also a large part involved which consist in understanding the userbase, and our relationship to those, and who will use the prepackaged kernels, and who will build their own stuff anyway. Friendly, Sven Luther
