[U-Boot-Users] Changes to U-Boot Development Process

Wolfgang Denk
2007-01-18T21:10:45Z

Dear Kim,

in message <20070118114051.5c1c64a5.kim.phillips@freescale.com> you wrote:
>
> 1. what can we do about the 40KB limit on u-boot-users? A patch for
> new board support usually requires more than that, and even when
> given a URL, it's not as easy for people to review the patches
> properly.

We may see changes to the mailing list soon. The whole way how SF is
running there "services" and how they (not) respond to support
requests is more and more annoying to me.

Nevertheless, I see actually no reason to change the size limit. I
haven't seen any many board/ directories that exceed 40..50 kB in
size, and if you compress the patch than the size limit should not
affect you.

It *does* bite you if you ignore the patch submission rules, though,
i. e. the requirement to break patches up into independent, orthogonal
pieces, etc. But that's actually a good thing.

So if you should hit the size limit, the first thing you should do is
asking yourself what you did wrong ;-)

> 2. what is the utility of the "U-Boot spam^H^H^H^Hpatch tracking
> system"? and the "DENX Support System" for that matter? Is it me or
> are they just cluttering people's inboxes?

We (DENX) use OTRS (see http://otrs.org/) for ticket tracking (i. e.
to handle support calls), and we are also experimenting with using it
as a patch database system. I have to admit that we have not found
yet a configuration that looks satisfying to us, and thus I refrain
from making the current state available to others.

I apologize if you feel annoyed by the mails sent by our system, but
we need some tests with the real "public" setup, too. Maybe you can
setup a filter to automatically drop all messages containing "[DNX#'
in the subject line?

> 3. does a subsystem maintainer get leverage into changes made in the
> higher level components of Das U-Boot? E.g., I'm still a firm
> believer that the device tree source should live in the bootloader ;)

Of course the custodians will play a special role when it comes to
moving code upstream. But that does NOT mean that we intend to stop
listening to "normal" users, too. And even as a custodian you will
run into situations where several people will have different point of
views. Actually I expect that you would see such situations more
frequently, as then you have to negotiate both up- and downstream.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

--
Software Engineering: Embedded and Realtime Systems, Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
"Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries."
- William George Jordan