Anybody working on rtl8712?

[Kristina Martšenko]

On 20/06/14 20:15, Larry Finger wrote:
> On 06/20/2014 10:40 AM, Kristina Martšenko wrote:
>> Hi Larry and Florian,
>>
>> I'm helping Greg do a bit of cleanup in the staging tree. I noticed that
>> nobody seems to have worked towards moving rtl8712 out of staging in
>> over a year. Are there any plans to clean it up and move it out soon?
>> Because otherwise we're going to have to delete the driver, as we don't
>> want staging to become a permanent place for unfinished code.
> 
> Kristina,
> 
> Wireless drivers that do not use mac80211 cannot be placed in the
> regular wireless tree, no matter how polished and finished they are.

I agree "finished" isn't a good word for it, but I was referring to all
the changes that need to be made, including porting to mac80211.

> Is having a rigid delete schedule in the best interests of the users?
> That driver is crap code, but it works and it does not crash!

Hey, I'm just trying to figure out if there's any hope of it ever moving
out of staging. If not, and we leave it in, then it sets a dangerous
precedent. Why should anyone ever clean up their driver if they can just
put it in staging and it will stay there forever? We end up with a
larger and larger body of code in the kernel that's low quality, and
that means more bugs etc. And that's not good for anyone, including the
users.

In this case, since Christian is working on it, I think the current
driver can stay in.

> There has been an effort to develop a driver to replace it, but I am not
> involved in that effort. I am not even sure it would use mac80211, thus
> it might also be in staging. I have been kept busy incorporating the new
> PCIe devices whose drivers do satisfy the requirements for being placed
> in the regular tree, once the code is polished. Even so, two such
> drivers are currently in staging, and need to be moved in the next two
> or three cycles.

Yes, I'm aware of your work on those, but didn't know about this one,
hence the question.

Thanks,
Kristina