On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 02:05:28PM +0100, Heiko Schocher wrote:
Hello all,
We have the real problem, that we have a lot of old boards, which are unmaintained in U-Boot, and we have no chance to find out, if this boards are longer used/tested ...
We also have a feature, lots of hardware support because lots of things don't change drastically, frequently. That's not to say that I wouldn't mind dropping old platforms (even that ones I have sentimental feelings towards), and would certainly like to see more and frequent sanity testing.
This problem comes up when we talk about doing big changes, and I think that's the right time to talk about things. And I think the answer should be, we try and convert things forward and when it's not obvious if things will still work correctly, or how to do it, that's when we need to make a hard push on the board maintainers to find some time to work on things.
It's not that being a U-Boot board maintainer is a near zero effort, when someone steps up to own a board, but to be frank, it also shouldn't be a frequent high-touch area either.
So, the question raises, should we introduce a column in boards.cfg, which shows the "livetime" of a board support in U-Boot?
I sense a lot of conflicting patches.