On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 11:02:08AM -0500, Dinh Nguyen wrote:
Hi Wolfgang,
On 9/12/14, 5:51 PM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Dinh,
In message 541373AD.4020902@opensource.altera.com you wrote:
Then I vote for myself as the custodian for u-boot-socfpga. By the way,
May I ask what made you change your mind like that? First you wrote that Vince was assigned to to that, and now it's suddenly you? As far as I can see, you have not participated in any SoCPGA related code reviews or discussions in 2014 at all, so what would be the difference?
Touche...
what is the difference between a Maintainer and a custodian? I don't understand why if Chin-Liang and myself are listed as Maintainer(s) for SOCFPGA, we would have to rely on Marek to pull in our patches for SOCFPGA?
A maintainer is someone who developed some piece of code and feels responsible for it - who is available as contact person for questions, or who will be asked to fix any bugs in that code.
A Custodian is "one that guards and protects or maintains" [1], i. e. he is responsible for maintaining the design principles of U-Boot and the code quality even for code he did not work on himself, and for patches submitted by others. This is a job that carries a much higher responsibility than just maintaining your own code. He will interface to the actual maintainers of the respective code, negotiatiate solutions and decide in case of conflicts.
[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/custodian
Yes, this is the repo will be the one that we will use. I have a couple of other things on my plate at the moment and will populate this repo shortly.
Thats great, as it means you will not lose any efforts when we start with u-boot-socfpga now, as you then can start with synchronized repositories right from the beginning.
FWIW, I strongly oppose assigning an external person to be the custodian for socfpga. Marek is fantastic developer, and my only issue is that he is not an Altera employee. I contend that an in-house custodian for socfpga is the best choice. I know that my voice carries little weight here, but I would, at least, think I have Altera's best interest in mind here.
I don't think it's a bad thing for the custodian for a given SoC to be an employee of the vendor as they're likely to have more insight into how things really work and be able to get questions answered about how/why a magic bit needs to be set.
Also, I went back and look at the "flurry" of patches for socfpga, and I must commend Tom Rini on a fantastic job for applying the patches. I was only able to find 1 patch that needed addressing:
[socfpga: generic board for socfpga] from Pavel Machek
Can you test it, and Reviewed-by/Acked-by/Tested-by or something the patch? patchwork collects these and that is a big part of our review and merge process here.
For now, I have it applied to
git://git.rocketboards.org/u-boot-socfpga-next.git for_next branch.
Here's a difference from the Linux kernel community. We really do want to use a git tree hosted on git.denx.de for pulls.
There are a few patches that needs to be addressed in the mailing list, but I don't see any other patches that needs to be applied at this moment. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
To summarize, have we failed as maintainers of socfpga that you would need to assign somebody else to be the custodian for socfpga? If so, I apologize and would like for you to reconsider your position and let us try to do a better job.
Just like in the kernel community, it's a position that has to be earned. I understand there should be big round of patches posted soon, which will be a good place to see follow-through. There's also the denali NAND patches which are blocking another SoC from going in as well which I'm hoping to see v10 of posted sometime in the coming week.