You sure are proud of that new driver! People won't use it because the
old one is working fine, so you think it's fine to force them to make
changes in their system to use the new driver. Best case is it works
after costing the user some time, worst case it doesn't and breaks their
system, so they stop upgrading the kernel and don't get security fixes.
Is it not obvious that the problem lies with the "when the old driver
gets removed" part, there is absolutely no effort needed to keep an old
driver, and if it's left in until some change requires rewriting every
module in the kernel, it's likely that either the old hardware or the
user will die before that ever happens again.
There is no benefit to users, if the old driver didn't work they would
have switched, there's no saving in support effort because, as you
pointed out, there are "hundreds of them" now.
This reminds me of Microsoft and XP vs. VISTA. MSFT is stopping sales
and support of XP to "force people to upgrade" to VISTA. You want to
"force people to upgrade" to newer drivers. The difference is that MSFT
at least has money as a reason, as far as I can tell the reason you want
to force people to use new drivers is because people put all the effort
into writing the new drivers and now most of us want to use the old one
if it works. We don't want to change configuration and hope something
else new works, because we know the old driver works for us and we want
to use our system instead of helping test the new driver.
I appreciate the effort it took to write new drivers, I believe most
users able to build their own kernels do. I use new drivers on new
systems because install picks them and a new system has to go through
shakedown in any case. I just wish that *you* could appreciate that a
driver change requires user effort and chance to find bugs in a new
driver, for each and every system, many of which are at EOL now. I wish
you valued the user's time as much as users value developer time.
*EOL - end-of-life, if your organization doesn't use the term. the "it's
paid for, use it but don't spend money on it" phase of ownership.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
--
