Re: kernel inclusion planned?

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Peter T. Breuer wrote:
> (and the football on TV has nothing to do with it, clearly).

;-)

> My point was that one needs to construct practical waypoints. These
> have to be very concrete.

I'm not sure if I understand your "waypoints" correctly: to me "waypoints" 
are essential to coordinate a task/tasks for a goal. And it's about 
coordination, as you said. So clearly, yes: if somebody (you?) really 
wants kernel-inclusion by merging both modules, the merging has to be 
coordinated to get to the goal. major "waypoints" would be the usual

1) try to merge the code
2) generate and apply patch
3) see how/what it breaks
4) fix it
5) try again...
6) submit patch ;)

although I cannot assist in 1) or 4), this is no rocket-science, IMHO. If 
only I had the coding skillz...

> the criteria I tried to set out .. essentially, they must be working
> code, and code that brings immediate benefit (or at least does no
> harm).

well, the "new, unified e/nbd module" probably *will* break one box or 
another. but bugs happen and with development in place, hardly to avoid.
(as long as they get fixed ;))

> What would the modules be called? (just something practical that
> springs to my mind as needing an answer :-).

% modprobe nbd enhanced=1

...too simple?

> A long time ago I asked Linus if he would take the enbd module and he
> replied that he would prefer to see mods made to the nbd module to
> unify them.

Yes, makes sense. My ext2/ext3 analogy was not so good as it's an 
exception.

> nbd maintainer (or was, last time I looked) and can talk to him. The
> initial change I suggested above would be only a few lines of patch,
> and would have absolutely no impact on current nbd functionality. Yet

well, this sounds not too bad :)

but again: I'm not requesting this, nobody else does, and if you don't 
care - why bother? I only thought of it and it does seem easier to 
maintain once it's in the kernel.

Thanks,
Christian.
-- 
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the curls in your keyboard cord are losing electricity.