Dear Luca Ceresoli,
In message 4D7FDD06.5080009@lucaceresoli.net you wrote:
Nevertheless, the board will never be publicly available unless one buys a quite expensive product, and I don't think detailed hardware specifications will ever be available (this definitely does not depend on me...). It's a product, not a development board or similar.
This really doesn't matter at all in regards of wether you can push your code upstream to have it maintained with the rest of the mainline code.
Do you think it would be feasible to give support even with such restrictions, if the software were publicly available?
I'm not talking about "publicly available". I'm talking about coe that has been merged into the mainline U-Boot distribution. That's the only code that gets free community support.
Pardon the question, I'm just trying to understand how the U-boot community does things as I'm pretty new here.
It works like other, similar communites, too. Take Linux for example.
Merging little pieces at a time was my "divide et impera" approach to merge ~1 year of upstream history without facing a huge mountain of merge conflicts, compilation issues and runtime failures all at a time on a codebase that I'm not familiar with. On one hand, it allowed me to learn a bit about U-boot, but I understand it makes it difficult to obtain support.
Such an approach is painful. Learn a lesson from it. Sync against mainline frequently, eventually even on a daily base, or at least every few days. Use tools (git - like pulling mainline into your repository, or maintaining your code in a brnch that you rebase against mainline).
I'll try the other way around with a big merge-all.
No. Create a branch, and try to rebase your branch.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk