On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 12:24:35PM +0100, Andrew Lunn wrote:
I think the major advantage here is that, whenever a person sends a patch which is not going to work on older kernels, he must also send a patch for compat.h/c.
Hi Antonio
This is where you are fighting again the kernel process. The kernel process does not care about older kernels, expect for patches flowing into stable as bug fixes. So anybody from outside of BATMAN will not supply such compat.[ch] changes.
Maybe its also time to evaluate the value of older kernels with newest BATMAN? Is the pain worth the gain?
Well, at least we have to keep compatibility with some releases: most of our users are Openwrt users, which means that we have to provide at least provide a package (with all the bugfixes) that runs on some of the openwrt distributions. Maybe, to alleviate this, we can think about dropping some kernel versions and support only the most recent.
However, as stated before, this is more or less orthogonal to what we Sven is proposing and we want to change now, but still it is a valuable suggestion that we may want to keep for the next step.
Cheers,
Andrew