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

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

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.

- Code changes in staging are mostly only scratching surfaces, minor
  code style cleanups, etc, what checkpatch suggests.

- 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.

- Then some drivers are pushed back after long time stay in staging
  (lustre is the recent remarkable case);
  it's understandable, but is definitely no happy end in both sides,
  after all.

So, I'd like to hear how we can improve the staging driver situation,
a better communication with staging driver people and the subsystem /
core devs.


thanks,

Takashi