gspca as part of the rawhide kernel?

[Hans de Goede]

Dave Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 03, 2008 at 09:45:06AM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
>  > Hi all,
>  > 
>  > As some of you know I've been working on improving webcam support under Fedora, 
>  > see:
>  > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterWebcamSupport
>  > http://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/
>  > 
>  > One of the things I've been working on is in beating gspcav2 (a v4l2 port of 
>  > gspca) into shape, although I must admit most of the work has been done by 
>  > Jean-François Moine, the latest version is available from his mercurial tree 
>  > and it has been pulled into the official v4l-dvb tree for wider testing. Once 
>  > it has been in the v4l-dvb tree it will make its way into the mainline hopefuly 
>  > for 2.6.27, if not then certainly fotr 2.6.28.
> 
> F10 is going to be 2.6.27, so the former would be awesome, but if it ends up being
> a .28 thing, us carrying it for a little while longer isn't a big deal.
> 
> Given there's motion on this going upstream, and it has a Fedora contributor
> taking responsibility for it (ie, you), I'm ok with the idea of this going in.
> 

Great!

>  > 2) Assuming the answer to 1 is yes, how do I move forward, can I get be added
>  >     to the kernel package acl, what are the procedures for adding a patch and
>  >     building a new kernel, etc?
>  
> I should flesh out the wiki page some more with these questions.
> But until I do..   hit up the accounts system and request access, and I'll
> add you to the acl.  The only stuff that's really different from other packages is.
> 

Access requested.

> * instead of a PatchN:  %patch N pair where the N's have to match up, we have
>   a PatchN: (where the value of N is irrelevant), just place it somewhere near
>   something similar [the uvcvideo diff for eg].  Then, instead of a %patch
>   entry we have an invocation of a macro called ApplyPatch which does everything %patch
>   does, but with some extra smarts (like rejecting patches with fuzz).
> 
> * As for rawhide builds..  I usually kick one off shortly after the 3pm rebase.
>   (That's when a new git snapshot runs from cron on kernel.org).  Sometimes I postpone
>   this a little if I'm expecting to add something else later.  The actual build
>   is just like any other package (make tag  ; make build).  If in doubt about whether
>   to start a build, ask on #fedora-kernel.  If no-one is planning to do one,
>   (or no-one answers after a while :)  then just kick one off.
> 

Thanks for the info. I currently have the following score with my testing cams 
(I've been buying every cam I can find which costs less then 20 euros):

2 are untested (-ENOTIME)
2 do not have a driver available in the kernel or in gspca
   (but do have some initial attemps located at sourceforge I plan on working
    on those later)
1 does not work even though it has a driver, I need to make usbsnoop dumps of
   this one under windows.
2 work, but do not have any exposure setting, which is a show stopper, as
   without modifyable exposure either they don't work in daylight or not with
   artifical light.
5 work good

Yesterday and most of today I've been working on finding out howto do exposure 
on the 2 cams without exposure setting. I've figured that out now and found out 
where the average lumination is found in the frameheader, so I'm busy adding 
autoexposure to these 2 now. As an added bonus I've also figured out howto 
activate the 50hz artificial light filter on one of them, killing the annoying 
flicker when using it with artificial light.

When that is done (hopefully tonight) I still need to take a good look at the 
locking in the gspca core and fix a few issues there, then I'll prepare a patch 
against the latest kernel in rawhide and add gspca to the kernel!

Regards,

Hans