[U-Boot] [PATCH v2] Merge and reformat boards.cfg and MAINTAINERS

Albert ARIBAUD
2013-10-03T21:32:12Z

Hi Masahiro,

On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 20:05:35 +0900, Masahiro Yamada
<yamada.m@jp.panasonic.com> wrote:

> Hello Albert
>
> > I set the board state in the new board.cfg to "Orphan" if and only
> > if the board was listed in such an "unknown / orphan" section, and to
> > "Active in any other case". This implies that:
> >
> > - some boards were present in the old boards.cfg but not listed in
> > MAINTAINERS (e.g. sh7785lcr), which means there are "Active" boards
> > which do not have a maintainer;
> >
> > - some "unknown / orphan" boards had a "last known maintainer address"
> > specified (e.g. EVB64260_750CX), which means there are "Orphan" boards
> > which have a maintainer listed.
>
> To sum up things, boards have actually 3 states:
>
> (1) Active:
> had a maintainer in the original MAINTAINERS file
>
> (2) Orphan:
> listed under unknown/orphan in the original MAINTAINERS file
>
> (3) maybe Active, maybe Orphan:
> not mentioned in the original MAINTAINERS file
>
> You pushed both (1) and (3) into Active state in the new boards.cfg
> although many boards in (3) might not have a maintainer.
>
> In such a case, what is the meaning to categorize into Active or Orphan?
>
> > IOW, a board's state (Active or Orphan) has no formal relationship with
> > this board having maintainers or not; the state only determines whether
> > this board should be built (Active) or not (Orphan).
>
> I think unknown/orphan stands for "no maintainers" in the original MAINTAINERS file.
> Now you recongnize this as "Should not be built".
> Is this the same meaning?

As far as I can tell, it is the same meaning -- by that I mean I
compared the build counts before and after the change and found no
difference.

Note that if a board was found orphan, it means that there was an
attempt to contact the maintainer and it failed. And if there was
an attempt to contact the maintainer, chances are it was because
the board had issues.

> In my opinion, 'Orphan' might be a misleading term for the latter.
> Active / Dead ?
>
>
> How abount reconsidering a bit more about this categorization?

If you feel that there should be a renaming, feel free to submit
patches. The only risk I see is that the name "Active" is used by the
makefiles to find out which boards it should build, so if you change
that in boards.cfg, you'll have to change it in the makefile(s) too.

> Best Regards
> Masahiro Yamada

Amicalement,
--
Albert.