modular -> monolithic

[Benjamin Close]

Dan Nicholson wrote:
> On Jan 21, 2008 4:31 PM, Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:
>   
>> On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 03:10 -0800, David Miller wrote:
>>     
>>> If you think it's OK to leave drivers unbuildable for more than a
>>> year, that's a serious problem.
>>>       
>> If nobody uses the driver, sure.  You only cared because we told you to
>> build the whole mess of code, which was our fault for doing so.
>>     
>
> I've been thinking for some time that it would be nice to mark some of
> the drivers as "unmaintained", similar to the "deprecated" modules.
> Clearly, some of the drivers (input-elo2300, etc.) are not being kept
> up to date with changes in the server. It would be nice to know which
> drivers have no current maintainer, and, hence, are probably going to
> be broken.
>
> This would at least tell users that they shouldn't bother with those
> drivers (the scripts could be changed to skip them, too, until they
> become "maintained" again). And if someone is relying on that driver
> working, then at least it is clear to them that it's probably gonna be
> broken and they better write (or pay someone else to write) some
> patches for it.
>
> Not a real solution, but at least people can know what's going on and
> not just suppose that the status quo will carry on indefinitely.
>   
I second this idea. Within each driver have a file called README (or 
similar) with two lines at the top of the file:


STATUS=maintained
MAINTAINER=insertemail(s)here

or

STATUS=unmaintained
MAINTAINER=

Other text could be below the lines.

These files could be used to autogenerate both a webpage indicating the 
status of driver, the current maintainer(s) and also used to 
autogenerate a build script of valid drivers.

Cheers,
    Benjamin