2.3.51 tulip broken

[Donald Becker]

On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> I see only the end results, and especially the cathedral style of
> development as applied to your pci-netif changes.
> 
> Let's look at your FTP site.
> 
> Stable tulip.c -- last updated Dec 28, 1999.
> Stable eepro100.c -- Last updated Aug, 1999.
> All other stable drivers are older than this.
...
> Test 3c59x.c -- last updated Dec 15, 1999.
> All other 2.3 drivers last updated in Sep 1999.

There is a reason for that for those dates, which you should have picked up
on.  That was when the driver development issue last came up, and I was
thoroughly flamed for separate driver development lists, especially by Jeff.
I was told that my contributions were no longer needed.

I decided to take a few month break from my driver update schedule, which
was taking up most of my waking hours, to work on Scyld and the Beowulf
software.  I provide driver updates to clients that value them and write new
drivers, but left the kernel development merges to those that obviously
wanted control of them.

Trace back to the beginning of the current thread: this round of finger
pointing was started because there are driver bugs that haven't been
addressed, and 2.4 is about to come out.

It must have seemed like a good idea in Autumn '99, when the kernel was
"just about to be frozen" in preparation for late-'99 2.4 release, and money
was pouring into anything with "Linux" in the name, to believe that my
Ethernet driver development could be better done elsewhere.  There were many
companies that could suddenly see that PR value in contributing to the
kernel.  And certainly there are developers that want to see everything
brought under the central planning of the linux-kernel list.  But replacing
my efforts is perhaps not as easy as it first appears. Nonetheless, the
decision was made months ago, and it would be very difficult to reverse it now.

Donald Becker
Scyld Computing Corporation, becker@scyld.com

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