Greetings, and questions about work flow

[Ben Dooks]

On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 12:32:59PM +0200, Pierre Ossman wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> For those of you not recognizing my name, I'm the maintainer of the MMC layer in
> the kernel (which makes it possible to read the included SD card).
> 
> I thought I'd get up to speed on how you guys work. "Normal" kernel works
> usually involves a git repo, but I couldn't find one on the wiki. Do you just
> keep replacing the patches in the svn repo when you modify stuff?

I find that git is not really suited to this kind of development, whilst
it does its job for the kernel maintainers, I belive it isn't really what
is needed when developing for a new hardware platform.

The first problem is that git seems to require a centralised point
of management for patches, and secondly, would you really want to pull
a tree with hundreds of internal development changes?
 
> Secondly, I'm curious as to what kind of contact you have with Samsung. The wiki
> states you got the SD driver from TomTom, not from Samsung, so I would assume
> not so good.

This is an area where more education is needed before anything Samsung
produce can be accepted directly into the kernel (see below for a
continuation)

> That driver is not a beauty btw, so my first task will probably be to sanitize
> it. Hopefully we can also get it in mainline. That requires a maintainer though,
> and I do not have time to take on that role. Samsung would be preferable, but if
> they're not available, is there anyone else that might be interested?

I am interested in what comments you have about it, it did not
look too bad the last time I cast my eyes over it.

For a long time TomTom and ourselves where the only commerical
organisations working towards an integrated kernel for this line
of processors. I know a number of other individuals have also
helped move this port along.

I hope that we have gotten through some of the issues to Samsung
about how to integrate code into the kernel tree. Unfortunately
they got stuck in a number of the normal vendor traps, including
sticking with a single 'stable' kernel, and a number of spawning
almost the same driver for each chip.

-- 
Ben

Q:      What's a light-year?
A:      One-third less calories than a regular year.