Re: Forked android kernel development from linux kernel mainline

["Ted Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 04:52:26PM -0700, david@lang.hm wrote:
> also, none of these other patches resulted in device drivers
> developed for a distro being incompatible with mainline.

What, people can't delete a couple of single lines of code before
submitting the device driver upstream to mainline?  Here's the world's
tiniest violin playing, "my heart bleeds for you"....

> I think that the concerns from technical folks (as opposed to
> journalists/bloggers) would go down drastically if there was some
> acceptable way for the incompatible bits (like wakelocks) could be
> stubbed out so that the rest of the things could be moved easily.

That was offerred as an interim/temporary solution, but no one seems
willing to commit that those stubs exist permanently.  At best, for
another 6-9 months before they would be yanked out again, which would
spur more fodder for the journalists/bloggers.

Personally, I would think that temporary stubs would be really bad,
raw deal for the Android team.  It would force them through another
set of hundreds of manhours worth of discussions (my folder with these
discussions is currently 10 megabytes of e-mail; given that there seem
to be irroncilable differences with respect to philosophy, and perhaps
outright commercial incentives that the Android approach not go in by
some of the participants, I have very little personal hope that more
talks would go anywhere), and then after 6-9 months, it would be, "no
forward progress", followed by the stubs getting yanked from the
kernel, followed by more rounds of misinformed articles written by the
tech tabloid community.

Why would this be a good deal for anybody?

					- Ted