On 10/10/07, Robert Schwebel r.schwebel@pengutronix.de wrote:
On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 10:55:20AM +0200, Sascha Hauer wrote:
There is several new stuff in the V2 tree, so here is an overview about whats changed:
We'll really encourage people to look into that tree, it'ts really amazing stuff. Next week we'll have a Technology Week with the Pengutronix crew (only net, no phone :-) which will probably be used for heavy u-boot-v2 hacking. So any ideas from the community are welcome!
- Cleaned up the tree. Most board supports and currently not supported architectures and drivers have been removed. Of course it can go back in once it is working again. This step seemed necessary to see what's currently expected to be working and what's not.
I think this is the only sane maintenance strategy. We want to have a clean tree, so anything which is ready for v2 must be reviewed anyway.
At the risk of creating a very long mailing list thread, I must say that I disagree. I do think that the v2 tree is interesting from the point of view of where U-boot can go, but I don't think it has much chance of becoming the new u-boot mainline.
The mainline u-boot tree may not be as pretty as the v2 tree; but it is the focus of active development which is even speeding up due to the recent changes in development process.
You want to show us a better U-Boot; GREAT! Show us how to get there then. Merge in the -v2 changes in a stepwise fashion. Maintain the stability of the existing board ports or provide time between changes to fix breakage. Don't ask us to make a wholesale leap over to another tree, especially if you're not able to explain how you got there (ie. not able to show the progression).
The reality for me is that as much as I might be interested in what -v2 can do, I'm most likely not going to look at it for the following reasons: 1. I can't easily see the difference between mainline and -v2 so it is effectively a separate project (highly diverged fork) and so requires more effort to understand 2. It doesn't have as many board ports and so probably demands more effort when bringing up a new board. 3. It contains many architectural changes but there has been very little discussion of them on the list and so I know almost nothing about it.
I don't say this to slam the -v2 tree or the work that Sascha has done. Quite the contrary; I think that work is great. But with the amount of divergence and the inability to easily review and migrate those changes back into mainline, it is effectively a separate project.
Cheers, g.