Dear Wolfgang Denk,
We have about 650 Makefiles in the current U-Boot source tree; the top level Makefile alone has seen 371 commits since v1.3.4
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I am not in a position to remember each and every of these changes, or their potential impact on building in SMP configurations.
I understand that one person cannot remember the awesome lot of work that have been done since 1.3.4 and that many fundamental changes occurred during these two years.
I gave you quick answer: use git bisect to find out which commit makes a difference for your build system. Of course this requires that you have some build target that is supported in mainline, and that shows the same problem like your out-of-tree port.
I'm sorry I did not see the email related to this before sending the other one. This is a perfect suggestion and I'll probably setup a build configuration for the lite5200 board that is on my desk to see if my problem show itself.
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You seem to fail to understand how a free software project like U-Boot works. U-Boot is very easy to upgrade - we take great care not to break support for any of the supported boards, and we accept even exotic boards and include these into the mainline tree, even if there is most likely no other user ever.
So if you want to be able to upgrade easily just make sure your code is part of the mainline distribution.
Ok, I am now in the seat of someone that could push the idea of putting the next platform we develop into the mainline. But other MBA/Finance/Manager persons that really take decisions will surely ask my department why I would like to give internal informations of our product in a way that any of our competitors could get it easily. How could I give them an answer that would be aligned with the philosophy ?
I understand how free software project works, I have participate in some and even worked to revive an old dead project (http://datavibe.net/~essiene/ale/) into something up-to-date while I was at University. (http://sonia.etsmtl.ca/index.php?id=553) I've also participate in some kernel janitor task in my free time because I care about open source and I'm passionate by technology. I was a quite active member in the french forum of gentoo to help new comers and find solutions to problems. I care about people and I want the people around me to improve as best as they can.
I did not intend to be rude, but I have to admit that your attitude is not exactly in line how community projects like this work.
Then I'm sorry, but for me this project sounds like it is directed by a bunch of elitist who would not accept someone that don't already know how the project work. Criticizing and judging questions asked by people that may never have work on or with something like U-Boot before. If you are afraid of getting to much dumb questions then this means that the documentation and the FAQ from the U-Boot website could be improve in a way that new comers would find easily the informations they need.
I don't have the time to answer requests like yours in long prosa -
Then you can simply skip the question, this mailing list have surely more than hundred persons that can answer if they think they could help. I don't think anybody ask that you answer to all emails, this is surely an extremely huge time consuming task.
Maybe you want to read http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
And maybe you want to read http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9y9de/eric_raymonds_famous_how_to_ask...
Have a nice day
Sylvain