Subject: Re: ural(4) for NetBSD 3.0, now sync'ed with OpenBSD ural driver
To: Damien Bergamini <damien.bergamini@free.fr>
From: David Maxwell <david@crlf.net>
List: tech-kern
Date: 11/29/2005 15:05:50
On Tue, 29 Nov 2005, Damien Bergamini wrote:
> My implementation is fortunately not a copy&paste of what is in ath(4).
> The ath(4) implementation of AMRR seems obviously broken to me.
> I don't think node_reset() should be called at the end of ath_rate_update().

If we shared the AMRR implementation between the two drivers, your fixes
would apply to both.

If we keep them separate, other people will need to fix the ath() one - and
if they don't realize that there's another one in ural(), we end up with
two different implementations of the same (intended) function. To my way
of thinking, that leads to more maintainence cost in the code than the
effort would be in sharing the code in the first place.

The challenge is that it's not the same person doing the work in the two
cases, and in convincing person #1 that that extra work is beneficial to
the project as a whole.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Although some of you out
there might find a microwave oven controlled by a Unix system an attractive
idea, controlling a microwave oven is easily accomplished with the smallest
of microcontrollers. - Russ Hersch - (Microcontroller primer and FAQ)