[U-Boot] Suggestion for building all boards

[Albert ARIBAUD <albert.u.boot@aribaud.net>]

Hi Simon,

On Fri, 11 Oct 2013 16:00:37 -0600, Simon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>
wrote:

> Hi Masahiro,
> 
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 5:29 AM, Masahiro Yamada
> <yamada.m@jp.panasonic.com> wrote:
> > Hello experts, custodians.
> >
> 
> > To sum up my suggestion,
> >
> >  - Collect pre-built suitable crosstools for all architectures
> >    on U-boot ftp site.
> 
> Great idea. If you can organize a tarball (or more than one) and a
> place to put it then we could make buildman fetch and setup
> automatically.
> 
> >
> >  - Check all boards automatically using those recommended
> >    crosstools and post the result to the mailing list.
> 
> Would be very helpful.
> 
> >
> >  - Add new status to boards.cfg to mark boards with a problem.
> 
> This is for boards that are already broken I think.

There is some discussion about the Status field in boards.cfg, which
might result in moving it from its current "build/don't build" semantics
into something more like "maintainers mentioned at the end are active /
inactive, but the board still builds anyway".

Still, boards.Cfg is for long-term board info, whereas the build
breaks discussed here are short-term: if someone submits a patch which
breaks some board, we don't apply it until there is a new version that
fixes the break. Granted, we may detect board breaks after a patch is
applied, but then we as the submitter to provide a separate fix patch
within the same release cycle. 

Also, adding some "builds / doesn't build right now" info in boards.cfg
will IMO cause either one of two bad side effects: an observable volume
of patches submitted just to keep boards.cfg up to date wrt which board
builds or not; or a burden to submitters whose patch (series) break or
fix some board(s) and who would then have to also update boards.cfg
with this.

I don't think we want to ask any submitter to add this to their work,
or even to build-test across all of U-Boot's boards to see if they're
breaking some board they don't know in an architecture they know nothing
about. That's for custodians to do, not for submitters.

Amicalement,
-- 
Albert.