[PATCH RFC] ARM: at91: remove at91_register_uart_fns and headers

[manabian@gmail.com (Joachim Eastwood)]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Nicolas Ferre <nicolas.ferre@atmel.com> wrote:
> On 04/08/2012 11:55 PM, Andrew Victor :
>> hi,
>>
>>> Yeah, as far as I know, nobody ever used this functionality on AVR32.
>>> In fact, I can't even think of a reason to use it.
>>>
>>> But I seem to recall submitting a patch to remove this functionality a
>>> long time ago, and it was struck down. I don't remember the reason,
>>> but there's a chance it might still be valid.
>>
>> Some of the SAN People / Multenet AT91RM9200 boards needed it....
>> We needed to use GPIO pins for some of the modem-control signals -
>> couldn't use the standard pins since the alternate pin function was
>> being used.
>>
>> Regards,
>> ?Andrew Victor
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> Well if it is of some interest on your side, I am in favor of keeping
> this feature. It is not a so big amount of code and seems quite easy to
> maintain...

It's not a big deal for me whether the code stays or not. The only reason I
bumped into it was while trying to get atmel_serial to compile as a module
and the serial_at91.h header generated some build error.

But still, why keep a feature with no mainline users. A new kernel feature
is never accepted without any users.

I also think it's hard to maintain the code without any users. I may be easy
to preserve the code but you can never change/improve the code since
you can't change the users of the code.

regards
Joachim Eastwood