ajdkernel friends: what's your preferred strategy for announcing to users that you're deprecating a driver and plan to remove it soon?
Petr Tesarik@ajd Send an RFC patch series with a lot of removed lines, see how many people start screaming, then calm them down with a promise that the driver is going to stay for a few more releases, but then it will be removed unless someone else steps up. 😉
@ajd The strategy behind it is that there is some discussion on the mailing list which will be noticed and reported by @kernellogger and maybe Phoronix, so even non-developers become aware.
@ptesarik @kernellogger haha that is definitely a strategy! though the driver I am looking at removing is pretty niche (specialised hardware that costs >$5000, basically all enterprise or academic users) and I suspect they're not going to find out via Phoronix!
@ajd @kernellogger Yes, the details depend on the specific driver. Some drivers would be quite hard to remove (think e.g. virtio-blk), but it's always worth a try.
Make kernel small again! #mksa
penguin42@ajd @ptesarik @kernellogger Don't bet on how many people bought them on eBay 🙂
Anyway, I guess supposed to start with Documenation/process/deprecated.rst ?
Then some distros would drop it from new releases.
Anyway, I guess supposed to start with Documenation/process/deprecated.rst ?
Then some distros would drop it from new releases.
@penguin42 @kernellogger I believe @ajd asked about a “plan to remove it soon”. The official process takes four to five years, which I assumed was NOT soon.
@ptesarik @kernellogger @ajd Well there's no reason to rush to actually remove code; mark it deprecated and then laugh evilly at anyone who asks why it's broken.
@penguin42 @kernellogger @ajd Good, then the deprecation process works fine. You may not even have to remove the code. If you're lucky, it will be deleted by @gregkh to solve a CVE.
@penguin42 @ptesarik @kernellogger that process seems to be focused on internal APIs, rather than drivers