[alsa-devel] Moving sound/* to drivers/ ?

[Jaroslav Kysela]

On Thu, 22 May 2008, Rene Herman wrote:

> On 22-05-08 01:37, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> 
> > Speaking as a former OSS driver maintainer, I always preferred
> > drivers/sound.
> > 
> > Though Rene's suggestion (use both sound/ and drivers/sound/) might make
> > sense if the subsystem code is huge -- I supported the drivers/block/ ->
> > block/ code movement for example.
> 
> Well, not _huge_ but ALSA is very much structured like that; large middle
> layer with "miniport" drivers (I do by the way expect this was also Takashi
> plan originally due to him using sound/* and not just "sound/"; that is, I
> took the * to be shorthand for isa, pci, usb and so on)
> 
> From a structural view, the PCM core is just as much not a driver as the IP
> protocol isn't one and moving all of sound/ to drivers/ would trade the
> current "why are the drivers not under drivers/?" issue for a "why is all this
> non-driver code under drivers/?".
> 
> This "net model" of sound/ and drivers/sound/ would be cleanest I feel.

Yes, it was one reason why I used 'sound/' as root of the ALSA tree. The 
second reason was to move old OSS tree to new directory to make less 
confusion. And the third reason was to just keep ALSA directory same as in 
our local development tree (which is out-of-kernel tree - containing only 
ALSA parts).

I feel that from the maintenance perspective, having one directory is a 
plus. We have already 'drivers/usb/core', 'mmc/core', 'drivers/base' (ALSA 
toplevel and midlevel modules use functions from this tree) etc.

If we have general consensus that sound drivers should go to back to
'drivers/sound' then I would move all code. We can move 'sound/core' tree 
to '/sound' in next round later...

						Jaroslav

-----
Jaroslav Kysela <perex at perex.cz>
Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
ALSA Project, Red Hat, Inc.