Re: NAK new drivers without proper power management?

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Sat Feb 10 2007 - 18:20:48 EST


Nigel Cunningham wrote:
If your device requires power management, and you know it requires power
management, why not just implement power management? Doing -ENOSYS
instead is like saying -ESPAMMEBECAUSEIMLAZY.

Let me put it another way: People keep talking about Linux being ready
for the desktop. To me at least (but I dare say for lots of other people
too), being ready for the desktop means that things just work, without
having to recompile kernels or bug driver authors or wait twelve
months.

And it means that doing a bare minimum isn't enough. We keep claiming
that Open Source is better than Proprietary software. If we accept
half-pie jobs of implementing support for anything - driver power
management support or hibernation support or whatever - as 'good
enough', we're undercutting that argument. Linux's power management
support should - as far as we're able - be at least as good as that
other operating system's and preferably way, way better.

-ENOSYS is just not acceptable.

Well, it's probably more acceptable than silently doing nothing and the device failing or locking up the machine on resume, but I couldn't agree more that it's not what we want to be encouraging. Perfect may be the enemy of the good, but "works except no power management" is hardly what I would call good these days, more like pretty sloppy..

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from hancockr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

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