Re: Donation of ARM CubieTruck to anyone interested in developing ARM-Debian-desktop
On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 05:56:24PM +0100, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> I personally really dislike this upstream fetish.
It is the only way that has managed to keep things supported long term
so far.
> The effect is highly detrimental, as it mostly ignores the hard work
> needed on getting broken and bad code in difficult places fixed. The
> initial and perhaps easy bits make it upstream, and then after a while,
> a new platform comes along and interest is lost, and upstream has just
> some initial code included, which will only have limited use. At the
> same time, the difficult bits will have seen less love as well, and
> no-one will have won anything. And then, a few years down the road,
> upstream will do what they did with telechips.
The first people to loose interest in supporting something is the chip
maker in my experience.
That is why as both an end user of devices and someone that works with
making devices using SoCs, I hate companies that don't aim to mainline
things right away. In fact for the next project I am working on we are
telling the chip vendors we are talking to that if they aren't working
to get things mainlined, then we won't use their chip. Fortunately
some of them do seem to already be doing a good job writing clean well
documented drivers and working to get the patches accepted upstream.
It is too much effort to keep merging patches when trying to move to
a newer kernel with new features. A lot of chip makers get stuck with
one kernel version, because it does what they think is important, but
not what I think is important. If everyone is mainlined, then everyone
can actually work together.
So it is not a fetish, it is a bloody good idea to mainline. It also
means you actually get some comments from really experienced people on
your drivers all for free. Why would you not want that? Well unless
you think getting the product shipped in 2 weeks from conception is the
only thing that matters, never mind how shitty and unmaintainable your
code is.
--
Len Sorensen
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