Over the last several months I have been pushing Ron to start making stable releases of the LinuxBIOS tree.
I have contributed the code for Version numbers, and I have been stable releases for boards I support from my own tree.
Watching the LinuxBIOS tree one of the things I have seen is that change happens, and it breaks old ports. And as a developer I want more change so new ports are easier to do and simpler to maintain.
The path forward as I see it is to freeze the core of the tree, and to have a stable 1.0 release series. With the goal being that from release to release, we do not break any existing port in the tree. To achieve this we need to freeze the core of the tree. And put any chipset code into at least a slush so fixing one board does not break an old board.
Once all of the working boards are available in the stable tree, there is not a need to avoid breaking things in the development branch. A working even if someday antiquated version will always be available just be fetching an old stable release.
So that is my plan for breaking everything without breaking anything:)
Eric