[i2c] [PATCH] basic gpio_chip support for 16-bit PCA9539 GPIO expander

[Ben Gardner]

Hi all,

I guess I'll give my opinion on this topic.

On Dec 7, 2007 11:59 AM, Jean Delvare <khali at linux-fr.org> wrote:
> > do you prefer the legacy pca9539 driver to be still sitting in i2c/chips,
> > or you wanna remove it completely.
>
> That's a question for Ben (or more generally people who use this
> driver.) If Ben knows all the platforms that are using the original
> driver and all of them will be instantly converted to use the new
> driver then I'm fine with killing the original driver now. If not, then
> we must tag the original driver as deprecated and schedule it for
> removal in 6 months or so. As we can't have two modules with the same
> name, you'd also need to rename the original driver (or find a
> different name for the new one.)

I used this driver with custom boards that are based on the Geode GX
or Geode LX.
Note the past tense.

My current application software has to run on multiple operating
systems (Linux, QNX, LynxOS), so I found it easier to use the i2c-dev
interface on Linux and use a similar "bus" interface on the other
guys.
Same app code, different I2C library.

I don't much care whether the driver is changed now or remove later,
as I no longer need it.
I'm not aware of anyone else that uses the driver.

I think it is a good idea to use a different module name like
gpio_pca9539 for the new driver.
Deprecating the old driver also sounds like a good idea

Ben