On Sat, 2022-04-16 at 08:25 -0700, ron minnich wrote: > nico, it was not so much a matter of me jumping on the bandwagon, as > my reluctance to get involved in another never-ending discussion over > retiring a platform that nobody uses or cares about. > > But let's keep it simple. I think it's clear that the effort to > maintain the Quark is > 0. The number of users is zero. The effort per > user, depending on what you get when you divide a number by zero, is > "high" :-) > > But there's a bigger issue here. If I have a board, which ran coreboot > at some time, which version of coreboot do I use? In many cases, the > working version of coreboot will not be master. That is true for > chromebooks in many cases, which is why Google maintains a fork for > each chromebook, once it is known to work. If you've been doing this > for long enough, you've experienced building a mainboard at tip of > tree and having it not work; then finding an older commit for which > the board does work. > > This discussion has led me to believe that we should change how we > name branches. People get upset that boards are not in master. Should > we get rid of the entire idea of a master branch which works for all > boards, since that is not quite true anyway? Or is the problem that > people don't want to see a name lost to memory (I understand that)? > Can we maintain a record of boards, along with the last working > commit? > > In other words, builds != boots. But we continue to act as though > boards that build will also boot. This is known not to be true. > > The issue is not whether my board is in master. The issue is, what's > the last known commit in coreboot for which a board was tested and > known to work? > > So we would no longer deprecate boards, or drop them, or do whatever > gets people upset. We would have a way to know, for any given board, > which commit to check out to build it. The list of boards would grow > over time, and it would be easy to checkout a board and build it. > Boards would not be lost to memory.
huh, not sure I understand that. No longer drepecating boards = keep them in master forever? ... or do you mean "drop from that list"? > > We could acknowledge this reality by naming master to tip, or some > similar name, which is less likely to get people upset. I don't think renaming the branch helps. The reason people get upset seems to be that something that *might possibly work (or not)* get's *lost* (when did git lose anything? \o/) and because their illusion of "maintenance" is disturbed. (You actually named it: builds != boots) Oh well, and of course these boards/platforms won't benefit from new "features" when not in master, as mentioned by Peter. It doesn't seem to matter at all if these "features" even work or not... > > This was my original goal for the mainboards status page, but we never > got there. Maybe it's time to bring that to life. > > On Sat, Apr 16, 2022 at 7:33 AM Nico Huber <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Hi Sheng, > > > > On 16.04.22 11:01, Sheng Lean Tan wrote: > > > Personally I think moving Galileo soc to stable branch is a win-win > > > situation for all of us. > > > > it looks like nobody is maintaining such a stable branch yet. Would you > > volunteer to maintain one for Quark? AIUI, some people already want to > > take care of testing. So you'd only have to maintain compatibility with > > newer toolchain and payload versions and such. > > > > > For the enthusiast who still want to use it are freely to do so without > > > the baggage, and for others it’s a great savings on resources spent, so > > > that we could leave more rooms (and also testing resources)to the more > > > upcoming coreboot products and architecture (I think much more will come, > > > the public has just only warmed up to coreboot ;) ). > > > > FWIW, most resources for newer platforms are wasted by copying code > > (kind of forking the original code in the same repository). So there > > is much more potential to save resources by adding proper abstraction > > instead. And what would be better to get the abstractions right than > > a diverse set of platforms in the tree? I'm not saying, you need Quark > > for that, but so far I also don't see how it could hurt. > > > > Nico > > _______________________________________________ > > coreboot mailing list -- [email protected] > > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > coreboot mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
