Re: Re: communication

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 01:50:47PM -0500, Nicholas Wourms wrote:
>David Dawes wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 01:39:45PM -0600, Billy Biggs wrote:
>[SNIP]
>> I have no mechanism for maintaining the linux fbdev driver I've
>> written within the context of the Linux kernel, so I provide it on
>> my home page.  If I wanted to create a mailing list for it, I'd go
>> to SourceForge.  Lots of Linux kernel sub-lists are hosted on
>> SourceForge.  Does that make the work they do any less a part of
>> the Linux kernel?
>
>It already exists.  What about the fbdev sourceforge project 
>that James Simmons heads up?  He is, after all, the defacto 
>maintainer of the linux fbdev/fbcon drivers.  I haven't seen 

I don't want to get lost in the details, but it depends on how
finely you want to maintain things.  If James Simmons is the
maintainer of linux fbdev/fbcon drivers, does that preclude
maintainers for individual fbdev drivers?  I'm not angling to get
some sort of Linux kernel maintainer status, but it does seem like
I'm not able to maintain my driver directly within the Linux kernel,
so my remaining option is to maintain it elsewhere, and submit
patches (I think using BK and saying "pull this" is essentially
equivalent to submitting patches when you compare the steps).

>you on the list, perhaps you might join and submit patches 
>there so that your changes can be merged into the fbdev bk 
>tree before Linus pulls from it.  There are also technical 
>discussions concerning the present and future of the core 
>fbdev api.  This way you could avoid the possibility of 
>breakage like what probably happened when Linus pulled the 
>new set of changes from the fbdev repo 1 day after your 
>intel patch went in.

I have been intermittently following the fbdev discussions.  The
driver I wrote was targetted primarily for the 2.4.x fbdev interfaces,
and I haven't yet had the bandwidth to port it to the latest fbdev
interfaces in the development kernel.  That's precisely why I didn't
submit it to that list for inclusion in the current development
kernel.  I'm actually (pleasantly) surprised to hear that it was
brought in and that someone else did the necessary porting.

David
-- 
David Dawes
Release Engineer/President                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes