On Thu, Feb 07, 2008 at 05:10:27AM -0800, Trent Piepho wrote:
On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Takashi Iwai wrote:
Right, if you are a developer, it's fine (and even better). But, my concern is that the whole linux kernel tree might be too heavy for some casual user who just wants to try the latest version of ALSA driver... "Download 50MB and use 350MB disk space just for a single fix? Hell, no!"
You'll certainly get a lot fewer users of the latest driver code if they have to download, compile and install a entire new kernel. There are plenty of people who will install new drivers, but won't even consider switching from the kernel their distro came with.
Judging from what I've seen on the IRC channels I hang around on I get the impression that relatively few people doing this on a user level (typically people with shiny new laptops and so on) are using hg to access the drivers - they mostly seem to be using either the snapshot or release tarballs to update their existing kernels. So long as those are available in a similar form I would expect these users would be unaffected.
It would also be a huge PITA for developers who work on multiple sub-systems. If I want to make a patch for an alsa driver, I have to reboot into an alsa kernel? I try to go a few months between rebooting.
This use case is fairly well served by git - it is being used by enough subsystems for people to be running into it a lot. The support for multiple remotes makes it relatively easy to have a git tree which works with changes from multiple places and cherry-pick makes it relatively straightforward to move changes between branches for submission.