Bug#891502: ITP: irda-dkms -- IrDA subsystem and device drivers

[Christopher Schramm <debian@cschramm.eu>]

Hi Bjørn,

thanks for your comment.
> Why not raise your hand and offer to maintain IrDA in mainline instead?

I might be wrong but that just sounds like a lot of work and
responsibility which I cannot currently offer.

> The problems causing it to be shceduled for removal will not be
> magically solved by reviving the code on github. There is real work
> required here.

Actually all motivation I know is that it "has long been obsolete and
broken". It's probably obsolete in sense of "Infrared what?!" for most
users, yes. Also, the code style might be obsolete in terms of modern
kernel hacking but that isn't really an issue in my eyes. I have no
concrete example for what's broken. There is an unanswered request for
such examples on the Kernel.org Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198657

> And maintaining the code out-of-tree is going to be much
> much harder than keeping it in mainline. Noone else will look at
> out-of-tree code even if they break it by changing some API.

That's my intention for keeping it out-of-tree. I don't want others to
*have* to look at it when they change some API and I do expect the work
caused by such changes to have a manageable amount for me.

> And you
> end up having to support multiple versions of the APIs as they change.

Right, that might become an if-else (or branches / patches) hell at some
point. That's definitely a downside of out-of-tree.

Any further feedback is very welcome.

Christopher