Hello, On Friday 15 March 2002 23:45, Mark McClelland wrote: > Nemosoft Unv. wrote: > >You mean the introduction of V4L2? Well, if that happens I will > > *probably* abandon the 2.4 driver; more or less what I did with the 2.2 > > series. But the driver is complete enough. But that's my call :-) > > Just thought I'd jump in here :) > > This is a redesign of the V4L1 interface. See > http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0203.0/0335.html . The > patches for the individual drivers are at: http://bytesex.org/patches/ . [snip] Okay, I've glanced over the patches, doesn't sound too drastic. However, I have two comments and a question. Comment #1 (the positive one) Appearantly this is a move towards a more unified handling of devices and files. I think this is good, less clutter and (hopefully) less errors. Comment #2 (the negative one) What an utter waste of time. I'm sorry to say this, and I've thought for a while if I even should mention this, but this is how I feel about it. In stead of fixing the problems that are there for V4L1, or making a commitment of getting V4L2 into the kernel and drivers, you introduce changes for an API that I consider out-of-date (though in widespread use) and work for us who write the drivers. My main complaint is that now I have to keep track of 3 development threads: the 2.4 kernel, the 2.5 kernel which literally changes memory subsystem every release, and this V4L1.1 interface. I'm sure there are many good reasons to do this, but the timing sucks (more about that below). Oh yes, for the Question: when do you think this will make it into 2.5 (if it hasn't already)? > There's a videodev.c patch there for 2.4 as well, but I'm not confident > that Marcelo will approve such a change. Me neither; considering the slow update speed of 2.4 atm I think it will go just like 2.2: it's stable and mature, and only the most necessary fixes will go in. > As for abandoning 2.4 because of V4L2, you probably won't have to do > that completely. The V4L2 "videodevX" driver works with 2.2 and 2.4, and > supports both V4L1 and V4L2 drivers and apps. Your in-kernel 2.4 driver > will have to be abandoned, of course, but 2.4 users will still be able > to use the latest driver from your website. Yes, but I'd have to make my driver ready for V4L2 (which is only backward compatible). And since that isn't in the main kernel yet, we have a chicken-and-egg problem... And by 'abandon' I mean that new features that make it into the 2.5.* tree will not be incorported into 2.4.*. Of course I'm not going to pull the source code from 2.4... > That said, the number of preprocessor statements in my code is getting > pretty bad. I'll have to abandon 2.2 soon, and eventually 2.4, or I'll > be spending more time on cross-kernel compatibility than writing real > code. :-) My point exactly. You may consider me a bit whining at this point, but for me the release of PWC 8.6 marked a point where I thought the driver was finished. It's stable, 99% of all functionality that I wanted is in there and I simply want to spend more time on other projects. Mind you, I've spend the last 2.5 years working on this thing, on and off. But now I hear from two different sides: "we're going to do things completely different", and that ticks me off. "Not now, please!" And frankly, IMO the V4L1.1 changes don't add much value. Having said all this, I want to say you won't have to worry. I will still maintain the driver and answer the questions from users. It's just that updates may be a bit more slow. - Nemosoft
