[coreboot] Changes to the coreboot Project Structure

[David Hubbard]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 9:10 PM, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:

> Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> > The proposition of gatekeepers would essentially kill community effort.
>
> That might not be a bad thing.
>
> Unfortunately, considering how the hardware industry works, individual
> contributors in the community can't work on code for current hardware.
>
> coreboot is only relevant once it supports the hardware that is being
> designed in. After design is done the window is closed; a firmware
> has been chosen, and coreboot wasn't on the table.
>
> By current hardware I don't mean what is shipping or what is being
> implemented in coreboot. Current hardware is what is being designed
> by silicon vendors. The time between design and shipping products is
> on the order of several years and the longer it takes for coreboot to
> run on that silicon the less relevant coreboot is.
>
> By the time individual contributors can make significant contributions
> for a particular silicon that silicon is long obsolete, so those efforts
> will only tend to support coreboot as a pointless niche project.
>
> That's not why I contribute to coreboot.
>

Peter, you make good points. As a purely community contributor I'd be happy
to sign any necessary NDAs to contribute on Google designs. Take a look at
the Linux Foundation NDA program:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/developer/nda

Coreboot can be relevant even if it only supports "obsolete" silicon.
Coreboot was the first to bring sub-second boot times to laptops. There are
more examples.

But Peter, what's your take on Alex's suggestion: "What do we need to do to
allow commercial contributors to work directly upstream? And before you
discount this question for menial technical reasons, please take a moment
to keep this conversation open, and let's try to find an answer."

> You cannot treat community as some kind of corporate entity.
>
> You're right, and it's exactly why individual community contributors
> are so limited in what we can do in coreboot.
>

I don't feel limited. Corporate contributors are of necessity restricted --
e.g. to large commits after the product ships. I grok that. Is there a way
to *reduce* the restrictions, and burdens in general, of corporate
contributors? To get them to work directly upstream?


> > You can't realistically put such burden on few people.
>
> As I understand the proposal, the kind of work that gatekeepers would
> do would be drastically different from the kind of work that reviewers
> must currently do.
>
> The burden for reviewers is currently very high because so many
> changes are not finished when they are proposed for review.
>
> Compare with Linux, where contributors more frequently than not send
> perfect patches which are very quick to review.
>

Reviewers could reject patches as incomplete. Ron, Alex, can you please
list specific commits that (for Ron) broke multiple boards unnecessarily /
(for Alex) bodged, nonsensical terrible ones? Those commits seem to be at
the heart of this question.


> > The changes you proposed would effectively make coreboot into
> > corporate project.
>
> It already is and as Ron described it actually always was. It's not
> possible to make significant contributions for current hardware as an
> individual contributor. I think coreboot may have an opportunity to
> affect this, but certainly not by using brute contributor force.
>

So let's affect this.


> > I'd expect a community fork to emerge quickly, outside of this new
> > limiting infrastructure and I'll be surely moving to community fork.
>
> Try to mentally balance the commit graph a bit differently.
>
> I think part of the proposal was essentially to have a community branch?
>
> That isn't too different from creating a fork?
>

I don't see anywhere in Stefan's *only* email on this subject that he
suggested a community branch. Branches were Alex's idea:
http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2014-March/077660.html

Stefan appears to be missing in action.

David
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