First off: I don't think having a complete code fork helps anyone.
> Having five people maintaining five PPC trees and occasionally sending
> patches to
> Linus seems the wrong way to maintain an architecture, and an implicit
> resignation to the total worthlessness of any PPC material in the stock tree
> at
> all!
Having five people work on different corners isn't a bad thing in itself.
Having five source trees with few people knowing which is the one that
patches for Linus are generated from is less than thrilling, but I'd
rather have those five source trees with active development on them to try
than one unified one with a lot slower development.
Personally, I'm happy with everyone contributing such huge amounts of
effort to the PPC port. I fail to see active development outside the
mainstream tree as devaluation of the port.
> >From what I've heard, sparc(64) support in stock is pretty good, m68k too,
> >why
> shouldn't we expect the same for PPC and ARM? (Oh- and stock 2.2 works
> decently
> on PPC too- I haven't had any problems).
m68k is a bad example here. 1) I'm pretty sure 2.4 doesn't run on m68k,
even 2.2 needs a lot of m68k patches, and 2) m68k has been developed a lot
more detached from mainstream Linux than any other port, including PPC.
The difference is there's only one source maintainer for m68k, and that
both eases merging patches with Linus, and limits the rate of development.
Why can't we expect m68k, PPC and ARM to have decent support in 2.4 too?
My guess is Linus doesn't care about those architectures, and there may
be controversial design issues that need resolving.
> I understand (from my reading of K-T) that features will appear in new kernels
> for i386 which break other arches, but then we should *try* to use the new
> features and patch against the main tree, right?
We should try to use the new features, OK. Patch against the main tree,
why? If that was so easy, and patches would be accepted reasonably fast,
we'd be doing it perhaps. I don't know what's the sticking point with PPC
patches, but I don't see this resolved by scrapping the PPC rsync and bk
trees and sending Linus ever growing patches.
Just MHO, of course.
> Maybe this is related to Eric Raymond's "curse of the gifted" post, and we
> really
What Eric Raymond? Never seen him on this list ...
Michael
