[arch-dev-public] lirc kernel drivers

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi guys,

As lirc package is currently an orphan, I thought I'd had a look at it
to see if we can clean it up.

Most of the lirc kernel drivers are now upstream, so we only ship three of them:

 *) lirc_atiusb: this overlaps with ati_remote [0] which is upstream.
This is bad as it means users will essentially get a random driver
loaded unless one of the two are blacklisted. Moreover, it is not
possible to use both driver at the same time for different devices.

It seems to me based on [1], that there is reason to doubt the
validity of the modaliases that lirc_atiusb supports but ati_remote
does not. I therefore suggest we drop lirc_atiusb and if there is
fallout from this we try to fix that in ati_remote upstream (e.g. add
missing modaliases).

*) lirc_i2c: this was removed from staging in [2], as the
functionality is replaced by ir-kbd-i2c (which appears to be written
mostly by the same people). I suggest we remove this driver too as it
appears to be redundant (though it has no autoloading support as far
as I can tell, so probably less harmful).

*) lirc_wpc8769l: I suggest we keep this as the only remaining module
for now. Based on comments in winbond-cir [3], that driver can
probably be extended to support WEC102* (WPC8769L is WEC1020). I'll
get in touch with the maintainers to check it out.

Any comments?

Tom

[0] compare the aliases as shown by 'modinfo'.
[1] <https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=5132088697fbfd1330facf723499091182f6ef91>
[2] <https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=41ca2b1ac269e2ed64e2562b91fa61cab0b19e7a>
[3] <https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/media/rc/winbond-cir.c#n5>