Subject: Re: linux-next: net/kbuild trees build failure

From: "John W. Linville" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2009 09:54:35 -0500

On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 06:38:19AM +0100, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 05:28:53PM -0500, John W. Linville wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 10:42:09PM +0100, Michal Marek wrote:
> > > reinette chatre napsal(a):
> > 
> > > > Right - could we please use the solution that works at compile time? I
> > > > used UTS_RELEASE after learning about its use in init/version.c, would
> > > > that not make it an approved solution?
> > > 
> > > It seems there is some misunderstanding.
> > 
> > Alright, if Stephen's fix is acceptable then your suggestion is fine.
> > Sam seemed to suggest that Stephen's fix was a stop-gap.
> 
> The need to use utsrelease seems very prominent in external drivers.
> But a quick grep turned up only a single staging driver in-tree that
> include utsrelease.
> So whatever problem this driver solves using utsrelease it is not shared
> with the rest of the in-tree drivers.
> 
> So no - it is not a stop-gap. It is more a "is it really needed?".

What problem are you trying to solve by eliminating it?

The iwlwifi team was trying to eliminate the nearly-useless version
number currently used in MODULE_VERSION.  As I said, I would prefer
to simply eliminate the MODULE_VERSION clause.  But the iwlwifi
team likes having something there, and UTS_RELEASE seems at least as
informative as what they had before.

So, the options are a) leave the useless version string as-is; b)
require the version string to get bumped on every update; c) use
UTS_RELEASE as a version string; or d) forcibly remove MODULE_VERSION
from the iwlwifi drivers.  Which would you advocate?

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
[email-masked]			might be all we have.  Be ready.