Hi Stefan,
On 20.11.22 00:12, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
On Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 09:17 Nico Huber nico.h@gmx.de wrote:
I've been thinking more and more about returning to a stable flashrom branch lately; starting over from v1.2 seems reasonable. The question is, how to proceed on such a branch?
Would you mind elaborating on why going back to 1.2 seems reasonable? That's not obvious, at least to me.
1.2 is still our latest release. The code has been tested for almost three years now. We have gathered fixes that came up in that time on the 1.2.x branch recently. I think it should be easy to trust it.
This is a little vague: it seems to me that the 1.2 release was also roughly the time when people started to care less to keep the master branch in a releasable state.
There are, of course, many cherries on the current master branch. But in what order should they be picked? And should they be picked first?
They have already been picked. So by the nature of reality the answer here seems to be yes.
I don't understand this "nature of reality". Do you mean that all the cherries on the master branch have to be picked before any other deve- lopment can happen? or even that they should stay in their original order? I think that would only lead to bikeshedding what the cherries are.
What about even older patches? There are still many patches on patch- work [1] and also on Gerrit. Some of them probably also cherries.
I would assume stuff on patchwork has by now been bitrotting for a few years and should not be committed without being forward ported, tested and uploaded to Gerrit.
I'm not sure about re-testing. If something still applies and there is no doubt that the original test results still hold, I guess I would also accept that. Otherwise, yes.
When I was still more of an official maintainer for flashrom, I tried to keep track of these things. And lately, a look at the wiki history told me that maintainers before me cared too [2]. But I guess nothing happened in that direction in the past 3 years.
Are you suggesting that you didn't keep track in the past three years? What sort of track keeping are you referring to here?
I meant to say I didn't keep track if anything happened to older patches. If somebody pushed any of the patches from patchwork to Gerrit, for instance, I didn't notice.
Depending on the progress with the 1.3 release, I'd suggest to either try to merge things in historical order, or start with the easy cher- ries on the current master branch (new chips and programmers that are ready; for a small release and then focus on a short release cycle).
What do you mean by "depending on the progress"? What are your key indicators of progress here that would influence one or the other direction?
I have no indicators yet. If I would start a new branch in the future, I would have a look then how things progressed for 1.3. Ideally it would be released already.
Nico
[1] https://patchwork.coreboot.org/project/flashrom/list/ [2] https://www.flashrom.org/index.php?title=Development_Guidelines&oldid=22...