Wolfgang Denk schrieb:
Dear Mike Frysinger,
In message 201007290018.40886.vapier@gentoo.org you wrote:
if the maintainers are effectively dead, then i'd suggest someone (i.e. Wolfgang) hand the custodian role over to someone willing to do the work.
Full ACK.
employment by the company who owns the processor in question only goes so far. vastly more important are the people doing the actual work and in this case, it seems like that person might be you vs anyone with @atmel.com in their e- mail address.
Full ACK again.
Reinhard, do you volunteer? For AVR32? Or also for AT91?
Hello Wolfgang, hello Mike,
that would be a possibility. However I was more thinking in the way, that since there are practically no other contributors right now that Wolfgang would take my patches directly to mainstream unless someone protests them in due time.
Apparently no one is testing them on other AT91 boards (are there any except for Atmel's EKs?); no one critisizes any coding issues :). Naturally those patches work on the AT91SAM9XE-EK (which I use as a substitute as long as our own hardware is not available - mid-August now). After that, I can still test on both.
Then I consider AVR32 a dead architecture for LinuX based systems, since all LinuX-able Variants (AP700x) are "not recommended for new design".
And I am still fighting with GIT in terms of producing Patches and reworking Patches, if, for example I later find an even "nicer" solution or continued testing shows up problems. Of course I read the man pages, read several articles about git, but they usually fail to explain the idea and inner working of a command. Sometimes commands have (for me) unexpected effects which are hard to undo.
As a custodian I sure would need more help and advice on how to handle certain situations. I would (for start) have to rely on advice from Wolfgang or someone else.
And as a custodian for AT91 I would mostly collect my own patches, <sarcasm> review them, apply them after 2 weeks of nobody commenting on them </sarcasm> and once in a while ask Wolfgang to pull them to mainstream?
Of course, hopefully more people would volunteer to work on that architecture there are still lots of places where coding style can be improved, not to mention the vast number of AT91 drivers using #define registers access instead of structures. Also when I tried to cleanup the multi-wrapped defines for controller adresses I noticed that this issue spans the whole AT91 files.
If, after considering my comments above, you still think you really need a custodian for AT91, I am game for it.
With Best Regards, Reinhard
PS: from messages in Atmel forums I notice that many users use some branched-off old versions of u-boot and (almost naturally) have issues with that.