On Tue, Feb 07, 2017 at 08:28:16AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
I definitely don't want that we don't attempt this. But brought from years of experience, I recommend to merge first (with pre-refactoring already applied, but helpers only extracted, not yet at the right spot), and then follow up with. Because on average, there's way too many trees with overloaded maintainers who maybe look at your patch once per kernel release cycle.
If you know that backlight and spi isn't one of these areas (anything that goes through takashi/sound is a similar good experience for us on the i915 side), then I guess we can try. But then Noralf has already written a few months worth of really great refactoring, and I'm seriously starting to feel guilty for volunteering him for all of this. Even though he seems to be really good at it, and seems to not mind, it's getting a bit silly. Given that I'd say up to Noralf.
In short, there's always a balance.
I don't think we can make a rule for this, it will always depend on the code. There is always going to be stuff we put in drm that should go elsewhere, and stuff that is elsewhere that drm should use.
I think however if we do add stuff like this, someone should keep track of them and try to make them get further into the kernel. In this case I don't think the patches are too insane to keep in drm and refactor up later, in other cases I'm sure it'll be lot more obvious (i.e. we could make the same argument for chunks of DAL :-)
DAL's not under this exception, since DAL is all about using drm stuff more (and maybe fixing a few things in drm helpers). My concern here is only about going outside of drm, where at least sometimes it's just utter pain to get even the most trivial bits merged. And holding up an entire driver for that seems silly, hence merge first, try to further refactor later.
For DAL amd has started to work on things properly, and since Alex is now drm-misc committer that should all progress reasonably quickly. -Daniel