Dear Tom,
In message 20131107133159.GR5925@bill-the-cat you wrote:
I feel this is the hard part of the problem, and what we're glossing over. What has to be tested by the board maintainer? What are we going to leave to their discretion? Will am335x_evm not count if I don't dig up the NOR cape for it?
Good question. Eventually this is something that develops over time.
Intially, we might be satisfied with a very basic "it works" message, which may just mean that this specific version booted on the actual hardware.
In the long run, we might provide a more detailed questionaire to the reported. I could for example imagine a tool that parses the board's config file and then provides some checkboxes - if there is NOR flash configured on the board, ask if NOR has been tested; similar for network, MMC, USB, ... other features.
One day we might even have more developers using automatic test tools so we could generate information on a per-command base.
I know that I'm just dreaming, but we should try to just be open for any such future extensions, even if we start really small now.
I think we all agree that _any_ kind of test information will be better than none.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk