Hello Albert
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.
To sum up things, boards have actually 3 states:
(1) Active: had a maintainer in the original MAINTAINERS file
(2) Orphan: listed under unknown/orphan in the original MAINTAINERS file
(3) maybe Active, maybe Orphan: not mentioned in the original MAINTAINERS file
You pushed both (1) and (3) into Active state in the new boards.cfg although many boards in (3) might not have a maintainer.
In such a case, what is the meaning to categorize into Active or Orphan?
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).
I think unknown/orphan stands for "no maintainers" in the original MAINTAINERS file. Now you recongnize this as "Should not be built". Is this the same meaning?
In my opinion, 'Orphan' might be a misleading term for the latter. Active / Dead ?
How abount reconsidering a bit more about this categorization?
Best Regards Masahiro Yamada