[U-Boot-Users] U-Boot-NG ?

Sascha Hauer
2007-07-02T11:47:42Z

Hi Wolfgang,

On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 11:17:15AM -0400, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Hi Robert & Sascha,
>
> >
> > > It would be nice if you could disclose what you are working on and
> > > discuss it here in public, before the design is cast in stone, so
> > > others can contribute ideas and/or code, give hints and comments
> > > and/or raise their concerns.
> >
> > We'll do soon. The idea behind that activities (at the moment codenamed
> > "u2boot", but we'll definitely aim at contributing that work into the
> > u-boot community as a proposal for next-generation) is that, due to
>
> Please don't wait too long with that. Remember to release early &
> often. I think it would be good if you shared your ideas without
> further delay - you see that there are activities going on elsewhere
> which address some of these topics, too, and it would be sad if
> anybody was wasting resources by duplicating efforts.
>
> Also, it is much easier to come to an agreement about design criteria
> and approaches for the implementation if discussed early. It will be
> much more difficult if you throw a full-grown thingy at us - I really
> appreciate your contribution and would like to avoid getting into a
> "use it or lose it but it's too late to change the design" situation.

There's a lot of new stuff so I had to make design decisions, but
nothing is set in stone yet. We can still change things and in fact I
expect this stuff to be unstable for a longer time.
Much work has been gone into splitting unrelated things apart and reorder
them in a clean way. Many things do not use global variables anymore and
generally use more abstraction. So even if we come to the conclusion that
I made wrong design decisions and things must be rewritten again, we still
have a relatively clean tree to identify these things and to see what
other parts a change will affect.

>
> > u-boot's very impressive long term stability and maintenance politics,
> > it is relatively difficult to change fundamental things in a clean way,
> > because you cannot do this while ensuring that all boards do still work.
>
> I see no problem with starting a new line of development in a separate
> branch if this should make sense.
>
> > So here's a short and incomplete list of what Sascha has implemented so
> > far:
>
> That's an awful lot, and I feel that you should have come out with
> this stuff much, much earlier.

Yes, you're right. Hacking without discussing it just gave me the
possibility to clean up things and see how they evolve before other
people can say 'doing this breaks board xy'. When I started this I
did not know if the ideas I had were even implementable.

>
> Please consider using git instead of SVN...
>
> > - Kconfig configuration system, stolen from Linux.
>
> We don't steal code. It's Free Software. Please avoid such terminoloy -
> we understand what you mean, but others might not and quote you out of
> context.
>
> > Plus more goodies all over the place.
>
> All this sounds fantastic, but please don't do this any longer behind
> clodes doors and without interaction with the community.
>
> > So please be patient for some days - I'll promise you that it's
> > definitely worth it :-)
>
> Can you please specify what "some days" means? 2? 5? 20? 50? 200?

Zero days. Last weekend I cleaned up my mess and have something to
upload. Could you provide an upload account? (right at the moment
I'm trying to find out how git-svnimport or git-svn are supposed
to work, this can take some time ;)

Sascha

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