[coreboot] Changes to the coreboot Project Structure

[Stefan Reinauer]

* David Hubbard <david.c.hubbard+coreboot at gmail.com> [140323 10:56]:
> 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.

Yes, we worked hard to get to that goal. If it were about obsolete
hardware it would have never happened though.

> 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."

For a number of contributions Google's community members have worked
upstream first (Think ARM port and rmodtool) A lot of times that was
critized, as the expectation is on the other hand, that corporate
entities provide ready to ship solutions, and not work in progress.
However, we are keeping it up for many patches, especially those that
introduce structural changes to coreboot, because we want to make it as
easy as possible for our fellow community members to engage in
meaningful conversation about these things.

Mind you, at no time does any coreboot development work at Google happen
"behind closed doors". Everything, including the code reviews and
up-to-date code repositories are visible and accessible by anyone out
there.


> 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?

Yes, and we continue to do that. Timely upstreaming/downstreaming is a
vital part of the process, and it's not always easy. There will never be
anybody trying to ship coreboot on any device working "on top of tree
upstream" just because nobody wants to do another week of testing
because some unrelated patch comes in last minute, or your target is
broken overnight on the day that you ship a firmware image to a factory.

However, all of the development process is completely open and anybody
can look at the changes Google is doing to coreboot, upstreamed or not,
in real time.

> 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

My original suggestion for a name of the coreboot branch with the old
boards (that get removed from top of tree) was "community-2014". I
believe this led to a lot of confusion among the ones wild at heart. The
name seemed reasonable at the time because it would contain all the
boards that you can get on ebay but not in a store anymore. I don't
think we need to get hung up on names though, anything is fine, really,
as long as it's not too hard to type and somewhat descriptive ;)

Stefan