Dear David,
in message 12068826.post@talk.nabble.com you wrote:
Furthermore, Wolfgang may disagree here, but I really think that only reference boards (i.e. boards needed for evaluation of processors etc.) should be merged into U-boot's main stream repository. Our boards are just variations of the Freescale reference boards, and I guess that's the same for many other boards by other companies. I wouldn't want to see ALL these boards merged into U-boot. Of course that if one finds a problem, or have an
Grant already replied on this, and I just want to point out that I absolutely agree with him. Just taking a huge amount of code that's publicly available for free, adding your own little stuff and never returning it to the community is something what happens here and there, but it is definitely NOT the way the free software community works, and in my opinion also pretty unethical.
Even if your board is just a minor variation of some reference board it is nevertheless important to have your changes and additions merged back into the public U-Boot source code. Guess how support for all that many types of flash chips, RTCs, PHYs, network controllers, ... you nameit ... got into the U-Boot tree? Not because these were used on reference boards, but on the plethora of different custom boards we support.
Guess where allt eh fancy features are coming from - support for graphical console, splash screen, net console, VLAN, POST code, ... came from? None of this was done for any reference board, it was all done for custom boards.
U-Boot would never even be half of what it is today if we added only reference boards.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk