Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] How can we treat staging drivers better?

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

On Wed, 05 Sep 2018 15:55:28 +0200,
Dan Carpenter wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 03:35:53PM +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > The staging driver is a wonderful process to promote the downstream
> > code to the upstream, but I have doubt whether it's working really as
> > expected for now.
> > 
> > - Often the drivers live forever in staging although they should have
> >   been moved to the upper, properly maintained, subsystems.
> 
> The only one that comes to mind is comedi.  I think those guys know that
> everyone is fine with them moving the code.
> 
> Do you have another example?

Well, not forever, but many codes remain there for many cycles, I
thought.  But I haven't counted and no statistics, so it might be my
false impression.

> > - Code changes in staging are mostly only scratching surfaces, minor
> >   code style cleanups, etc, what checkpatch suggests.
> 
> That's probably true for the wireless drivers because converting them
> to use mac80211 is complicated.  The other drivers seem to be doing
> better.

So which drivers were the good examples?  Maybe we can learn from
them.

> > - There are little communications with the corresponding subsystem;
> >   already a few times I was surprised by casually finding a staging
> >   driver code by grepping for preparing API changes.
> 
> Which ones are you interested in?

My primary interest is the sound stuff.

> I'd always prefer to hand off staging
> drivers to an existing subsystem but it's not always clear who that
> should be.

IMO, *that* is the problem -- no proper taker in the subsystem.


thanks,

Takashi