Hi Martin,
On 26.06.22 15:35, Martin L Roth wrote:
The idea behind the naming was the idea that the "modern" branch would drop all the old hardware that is no longer available, making it easier to develop and test. Presumably this would be the branch that the Google changes would continue on in. I'd assumed from previous conversations that the preference for the "classic" branch would be to drop those Google changes. Assuming that the split does happen this way, I'm pretty sure that both trees would see continued development.
thanks for elaborating. I see a lot of potential misunderstandings when we talk about "Google changes". To wrap it up: not all changes by Google are problematic of course. The reoccurring idea to remove problematic code mostly targets programmer drivers that are not tested. For half of the programmers Google adds, it turns out soon after that they are unused and nobody can test them, not even at Google. Sometimes the code wasn't even working when it was merged.
So if we'd remove the problematic code from one branch and remove code we can't test from another, that might actually hit the same code and remove it from all branches. And we don't need to fork to remove code that everybody wants gone, I guess ;)
That's when speaking about problematic additions. On the other end there's indeed a lot of legacy code that we also can't test. But maybe we should first discuss if it helps to remove it? The last time I stalled a patch for testing it wasn't because of super legacy code but rather because of compatibility to ~6 year old platforms. And the patch didn't fix or add anything anyway, so it wasn't slowing develop- ment down.
Hopefully, both branches would be stable - modern through hardware testing, and classic by rigorous review and a slower development pace since not everything is available to test.
In my experience, developers working on older platforms actually test much more. But that might change of course, once you have a branch that demands full testing.
Nico