On Monday 07 May 2007 19:25, David Miller wrote:
> I know this sounds trite, but when merging and researching up to 450
> patches at a time like I have to, this stuff starts to matter.
>
> Please put things as high in the directory hierachy as possible and
> when you can put the entire driver into a single source file do so.
>
Sure. I generally prefer that too, but all the drivers I put in wireless-dev 
were put in separate directories because I didn't want to break the pattern.

> The only significant argument you present is the code sharing one for
> the radio stuff, but that isn't realized yet and you can certainly
> split the code out once you make that sharing a reality.
Having different modules for different radio chips really isn't the point of 
keeping it in a separate file. (in fact, rtl8187_rtl8225.c actually contains 
support for two versions of the rtl8225 radio) It's just that 
rtl8187_rtl8225.c is basically a bunch of numbers with a bit of glue code to 
send them to the hardware. Not much is missed if you decide not to look at 
how the radio tuning works, and I like to avoid looking at that code if I 
can. It's also consistent with how the (unreleased) rtl8180 driver works, 
which really does have support for different radios in different files.

But of course, we can just make an exception for rtl8187. Would merging the 
files together make that much of a difference for you?

-Michael Wu