Hi Masahiro,
On Tue, 17 Sep 2013 09:55:00 +0900, Masahiro Yamada yamada.m@jp.panasonic.com wrote:
Hello Albert, Tom.
Commit 27af930e9 added Active/Orphan status in the first column of boards.cfg.
Could you tell the definition of "Active" and "Orphan".
At first I imagined Orphan means a board without maintainer. But the maintainer information is missing from lots of Active boards. So I could not find the difference between Active and Orphan.
I have listed as "Orphan" any board mentioned in the "unknown / orphan" sections of the original MAINTAINERS file.
If you look at the original MAINTAINERS, you'll see that some boards were listed under a maintainer e-mail, and some boards were listed under "unknown / orphan"; but not all boards were listed.
I set the board state in the new board.cfg to "Orphan" if and only if the board was listed in such an "unknown / orphan" section, and to "Active in any other case". This implies that:
- some boards were present in the old boards.cfg but not listed in MAINTAINERS (e.g. sh7785lcr), which means there are "Active" boards which do not have a maintainer;
- some "unknown / orphan" boards had a "last known maintainer address" specified (e.g. EVB64260_750CX), which means there are "Orphan" boards which have a maintainer listed.
IOW, a board's state (Active or Orphan) has no formal relationship with this board having maintainers or not; the state only determines whether this board should be built (Active) or not (Orphan).
Note that I have verified that ./MAKEALL -a arm built the same boards, although I have not verified this for other architectures; and that ./MAKEALL -m listed the same boards and maintainers (or more exactly, listed the same boards and attributed the correct maintainers, as some of the old ./MAKEALL -m output was incorrect), at meast for ARM and PowerPC.
Best Regards Masahiro Yamada
Amicalement,