Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Between a rock and a hard place, managing expectations...

[Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>]

Dan wrote:

> Standardization helps, but there is often a "system-software
> implementation-specific" gap that a standard leaves for an operating
> system to resolve. Linux is nowadays a first mover, and a primary
> deployment target.

When we designed pin control, I first made an iteration which we had
to throw away, keeping the old quote from "the mythical man-month"
in mind, "always count on throwing one version away". The same
happened with the GPIO character device. v2 looks good. We need
to realize at least from what I've seen, that Fred Brooks was right
about this.

Always having to throw the first version away is the most obvious
pattern that we should always expect, yet fail repeatedly to account
for and always get annoyed at. Why? It is expected.

Greg wrote:

 Why not have the community "fight it out" among themselves first, before
> we have to worry about it?

We can be a bit proactive with this, but it's more of elusive
entrepreneurship or magical coincidence when we do, and the
work happens seemingly unorganized.

The v2 pin control was designed in a conference room at the Embedded
Linux Conference in San Diego 2012 I think. nVidia, Texas Instruments and
Renesas were there, possibly more. We had a whiteboard. That
ended up with with the lines hooking it up in drivers/base/dd.c and that
is still the core behaviour.

It wasn't a fight, more like a good version of committee work, like a
committee without any prestige.

Collect the key people in the same geographical location and talk
it over, magic happens. Sometimes, at least. It's worth a try.

Yours,
Linus Walleij