Minutes from the Cross-Distro session at Connect (2012-05-31)

[Dennis Gilmore]

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El Fri, 8 Jun 2012 12:43:09 +0200
Hector Oron <hector.oron at gmail.com> escribió:
> Hello,
> 
> 2012/6/8 Alexander Graf <agraf at suse.de>:
> > On 08.06.2012, at 00:48, Jon Masters wrote:
> 
> >> Indeed. But the point is still there. Lots of other folks are using
> >> non-upstream trees as their source, which is a difference, and so
> >> we wanted to convey that Fedora is taking a different (and I think
> >> ultimately the right one, but I'm biased) approach.
> 
> > Not sure I agree here. OpenSUSE is 100% upstream - the only place
> > we have Linaro (read: non-upstream) code around is for u-boot on
> > omap, and that will be replaced by the upstream versions soon
> > enough.
> >
> > IIUC Debian is pretty heavy on their upstream only policies too.
> 
> I can confirm Debian uses upstream kernels with back ported features.
> But the ARM SoC support in upstream linux kernels could improve, as
> most ARM SoC lack features that you can find in out of tree kernels.

Right, i would love to support a framebuffer on the trimslice, as well
as the genesi smartbook and smarttop.  but right now there is no
drivers in the upstream kernels. so while they would make great
developer devices where they could run all there usual tools. and use
them as a development workstation. today you can really only use them
as shell boxes to do remote work. hopefully tegradrm makes it upstream
soon and we will be able to have the trimslice fully functional.  i
know that the genesi hardware is further behind in development of good
drivers that could go upstream. 


How can we as the cross distribution community help the vendors make
sure that their devices are fully supported in linus's tree? other than
communicating with the vendors, i think the best way is to make sure
that we all only use the mainline linus kernel and work with the
vendors to get their patches through the sub-system trees and up into
linus's tree.  calxeda are doing a pretty good job of making sure that
the patches get upstream. Im not convinced any other vendor is. 

It is my belief that working upstream is the only way to be successful
long term. It is healthy to have some distro competition as it
challenges us to improve and be better. ultimately fragmentation will
only hurt us all. I would strongly encourage all distros to do better
at getting there work upstream.  I know that ive failed with a couple
of patches ive written to fix some build failures in the mainline
kernel. mostly they are 1 liners to fix up Kconfig deps. 


Dennis
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