[U-Boot] [ANNOUNCE] Kconfig support

[Sascha Hauer <sha@pengutronix.de>]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:08:38PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Sascha,
> 
> In message <20090421182102.GZ21747@pengutronix.de> you wrote:
> >
> > > This is not quite correct. What  I  consider  important  is  an  evo-
> > > lutionary path - this may include bigger changes and reorganizations,
> > > but  I  consider  it a bad idea to not provide a reasonable migration
> > > path for larger parts of the existing community.
> > 
> > Then start proving your point by removing CONFIG_NET_MULTI. U-Boot carries
> > two incompatible network driver APIs for at least the last seven years and
> > still 19 drivers have not switched to the new API.
> 
> What exactly do you complain about? Have there been any such patches
> posted that I 9or anybody else) rejected?
> 
> > It was exactly this kind of stagnation that made me fork U-Boot. I was
> 
> You did not even attempt to fix this, or did you, and I repressed the
> memory of this?

No, neither I tried to fix it nor did anybody else. Probably because
noone wants to dig through numerous drivers for which he most likely does
not even have the hardware. The solution is to mark them as broken and
you'll get the relevant patches within a week. The drivers which are
still not fixed after some months can be removed as nobody seems to have
interest in them. I know this is a strong weapon which should be handled
with care, but I think sometimes it's necessary to use it.

sha at octopus:~/octopus/u-boot/u-boot find board -name "flash.c" | wc -l
201
sha at octopus:~/octopus/u-boot/u-boot find board -name "config.mk"| wc -l
411

So nearly half of the boards in U-Boot seem to be unmaintained since the
advent of the generic flash driver five years ago.
How can you possibly ever change the API for the flash driver with 201
different flash drivers in the tree without marking something as broken?
One of these boards is the Auerswald Innokom, a board Robert once
ported. We probably still have it somewhere @Pengutronix, but nobody in
the world has any interest in running a top of tree U-Boot on it. Still
it is in the tree and by policy it has to be supported for all eternity.
Mark the boards as broken, remove them and give the others some air to
breeze to actually change something without drowning in legacy code.

Sascha

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