On 12.04.22 23:22, Martin Roth via coreboot wrote:
Apr 12, 2022, 12:14 by foss@mniewoehner.de:
Maintaining without ability to test will make it degrade, too.
Exactly. By moving it to a branch, if someone wants to work on a platform, they can do it in a more stable environment.
I think it depends a lot how you define "degrade" and how the workflow of potential future contributors looks like. Platforms that are moved forward on the master branch without testing break, that's true. I've not seen any platform where every patch gets the necessary testing, though. So they all break from time to time.
And what are the patches doing anyway, that break things? Usually, patches that touch a lot of platforms are about maintenance (e.g. keep things building with a new compiler) or refactoring to ease future development. So even if booting for some platform breaks, is the code really degrading? Or did some of the refactoring actually make it easier to fix it?
And talking about slower moving branches as "a more stable environment": FWIW we moved code to such branches because it was in such an unreadable state that maintenance on master was too much effort. Is this true about Quark? IDK, but it seems nobody has said so yet.
I absolutely agree that if something isn't being used, it doesn't need to be maintained on the master branch.
I disagree.
Ok. Any reason why? I don't understand why would we want to maintain something that nobody uses on the master branch. If it's not being used, it can just as easily not be used on a release branch as the master branch, and then we don't have to continue to try to maintain it as the rest of coreboot moves forward.
It's always a trade-off. Is the Quark code really that bad that it is hard to keep it along?
Nico