Re: [Yaffs] Build error on 2.6.19 and my thoughts about the …

On Tuesday 16 January 2007 17:42, Aubrey Li wrote:
> Hi all,

> Has the patch been applied in CVS?

I have just applied a cleaner version of the patch to CVS.
Instead of more #ifs in the code it only does them in a macro near the
beginning (and in a ops pointer structure).

>
> Another issue is my thoughts about the source code.
> In my opinion, the current source code is terrible. KERNEL VERSION
> macros is everywhere. I hate it very much. It caused the code ugly.
> Since we have the CVS, why not maintain it by cvs tag/branch? for
> example tag_2-6-18 for kernel(2,6,18), tag_2-6-19 for kernel(2,6,19)?

This is an unfortunate result of kernel changes. Some of them good, some of
them not so good, combined with the fact that many people find a kernel they
are comfortable with and settle down.

I don't think that tags in cvs would help because many of the changes are not
kernel specific. If we add a new feature to yaffs then we'd like it to be
available to people still using 2.4. How could we do that with tags?

>
> If we still add kernel version control in the source code, the code
> will become more and more un-maintainable soon.

The #if code is only in two places: yaffs_fs.c and yportenv.h

I really **hate** seeing #if's inside code (it should preferably only be in
config stuff, IMHO) which is why all the tracing etc is done with macros
instead of #ifs.

While I agree it would be neater if we discarded support of historical kernels
I think that approach is far from useful to the community in general and
would be completely impractical.

Given the choice between a taste issue and being realistic and supporting
historical kernels, the taste issue loses.

So long as the kernel folk don't speed up on the number of arbitrary changes
they make, we should not experience too much further problems. Right now we
support all flavours from 2.4.something to current with only a few (44 by my
count) KERNEL_VERSION #ifs in yaffs_fs.c. I really don't think we're
anywhere near crumbling point yet.