Yes on both of these, but I didn't want to break current method. So I kept these to ensure both methods work fine.
One we have converted all driver to use register then we can remove these. Would have made sense to put a comment for that
My plan for this when I originally wrote the comment had been to make the contents of the soc-audio device probe and removal look exactly like what you'd write directly in a machine driver so no code except for the code doing the soc-audio device had any idea it was there. This would keep backwards compatiblity without special casing, making things more maintainable.
Hmmmm, I didn't want to change the current machine drivers yet, hence tried to move the code of soc_probe into card_register. So that works neatly (doesn't matter who is doing, machine or core) Only thing which I kept is to check for card pointer and if valid then call register (assuming someone is still using old method) which we should mark deprecated
card->dev = &pdev->dev;
This would be required only for current method hence kept it there. For anyone who uses register, the machine should set this up properly
And I agree that these things should be done by machine. But wanted to split the change to avoid any issues
So what I propose is keep it as is, I will resend the split patch series, and then after machine drivers are changed we remove these.
Btw this make me wonder what will soc_probe be used (it is not doing anything) Do we still need this and creating soc-audio device?
~Vinod