[pvrusb2] New driver snapshot: pvrusb2-mci-20110116

[Mike Isely]

A new pvrusb2 driver snapshot is available.  This one is kind of
interesting, well for me at least.  This contains no new features,
only a few cosmetic code changes, and one critical update to adapt to
a v4l-dvb API change that appeared for the first time in kernel
2.6.37.  That last bit is what really forced this new snapshot.

There are a lot of "non-code" changes this time.  I've been using the
v4l-dvb Mercurial (aka "hg") repository as my link upstream.  The
v4l-dvb folks a while back moved to git.  I didn't move with them at
the time because I wasn't fluent in git, and, well, I'm lazy :-) The
announced plan at the time was that changes would still be flowed into
the old hg repository, supporting those who still wanted to use hg.
This was indeed true for a while, but updates to that repo have gotten
less frequent over time.  Even now that old hg repository *still*
doesn't have the updates that appeared in 2.6.37 which broke
compilation of the standalone pvrusb2 driver.  Best I can tell right
now, the old v4l-dvb hg repository is dead.

But this left me in a pickle, because that repository was my
connection back to everything else.  I have a nice script set up that
allows me to flow changes from the standalone driver up to that
repository and I have a process that also allows me to pull changes
from that repository back into the standalone driver.  With that
repository dead, the cord was cut.  Had I been smart, I would have
anticipated this months ago and been ready for it, but the fact of the
matter is that I really have been distracted away on several other
projects for quite some time and since this issue wasn't screaming out
for attention (i.e. no new nasty bugs in the driver and most people
seemed generally happy), I didn't do anything about.

When 2.6.37 got released, this forced the issue.  Last week I tried to
resync against the old hg repository and discovered right away that
the changes I needed to test against weren't even there.  That's when
I sent the long post to this list last Friday, realizing that I needed
to rebuild my workflow here.  A long while back I purchased two good
books on git, and I've been going through various online resources as
well to get up to speed.  I'm still far from fluent with git, but I
know enough now to handle some basics and it was enough to allow me to
construct a new method to flow stuff directly from git into the
standalone driver.  Most of the changes in this snapshot are actually
new ifdef's to facilitate code transformation into git, and there is
an enhancement in the transformation script itself that lets me
retarget the code transformation to specific kernel versions.  You
don't need to worry about this, but suffice to say that I've regained
the ability to flow changes into the standalone driver this time
directly from any kernel git repository without needing to go through
v4l-dvb.

I still need to finish up my workflow to send corresponding changes
back *into* git, but the major hurdle is done.  Anyway, there is a new
snapshot available, and I have built and tested it against a 2.6.37
kernel built here.

As usual, the pvrusb2 web site can be found at:

  http://www.isely.net/pvrusb2/pvrusb2.html

  -Mike


-- 

Mike Isely
isely @ isely (dot) net
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