Hi all,
On 04/30/2014 07:31 AM, Masahiro Yamada wrote:
On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 22:41:07 +0200 Wolfgang Denk wd@denx.de wrote:
In message 20140428185854.B2B8.AA925319@jp.panasonic.com you wrote:
Before I send Kconfig series v2, please let me cofirm our approach of maintainers info.
Thanks for all your patience when dealing with all these apparently simple things that nevertheless take so much time and nerves to decide.
Instead, MAINTAINERS file as in Linux Kernel was proposed. (And the patch series by Daniel is already on Patchwork.) http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/340546/ But Wolfgang (and Albert) disagreed with it.
In Kconfig v1 series, I put maintainers info and board status in board/*/*/Kconfig as non-user-editable settings: http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/342089/
I find myself in the difficult situation that I'm not really happy with either of these approaches, but then I don't have any better solution to suggest. I think I find the board/*/*/Kconfig a bit better.
in general this sounds good to me. I also think placing the information 'who owns that board' should be tightly coupled to the board code, if we store that information at all.
But I also think we need something like the MAINTAINERS approach sent by Daniel. It maybe won't scale for boards but I think it is a better solution than the Wiki page. It allows fine grained allocation of responsibility for the code. Another advantage over the wiki approach is that one can get the information directly from the code, even off-line.
I thought a bit about board database and directory tree arrangement and wanted to present that approach here. While writing it I hit on the main problem.
So why do we need the board database at all? We want to know who owns a specific board for testing. But there is no procedure to check these boards frequently. We had this discussion before. The solution was AFAIR a database with Active/Orphaned switch. Orphaned boards should go to scrapyard when problems arise.
So again, why do we need the board database? Couldn't we just ask git who was involved in a board and ask those people when problems arise?
The database is currently also used for finding a board to compile. This will anyway be replaced by Kconfig. So for the 'which code compile' thing we need more a strict convention than a database.
The question is, do we really need that database?
Best regards
Andreas Bießmann