[coreboot] Proposal: Removing obsolete & EOL boards and chipsets for 4.2 release

[Patrick Georgi]

2015-10-28 4:56 GMT+01:00 Alex G. <mr.nuke.me at gmail.com>:
> Here's a list of things I think should be moved to branches, right after
> the 4.2 release:
So far the idea was to drop things in master after a release, and
create branches for releases (as I did for 4.1 yesterday, in addition
to the tag).
So, when dropping stuff after the 4.2 release, to go back to these
things, you start from the 4.2 branch.

> Now remember, this assumes branches are as first class
> citizens as 'master'. Look at chromiumos coreboot: plenty of branches.
> That shows it can work.
There's a significant difference (and a problem that we'd inherit by
adopting the chromium gerrit model):

The difference is that Chromium firmware branches are made per-board
for devices where not many changes are expected.
The items you point out are most interesting for adding new boards
(nevermind if this actually happens - but the Lenovo *60 stuff wasn't
predicted a year before it happened either, 945 was "dead" then).
If we go for branches for that, developing FSP1.0 coreboot will look
quite different from master-coreboot.

The problem we have with firmware branches over at Chromium is that,
as far non-ChromeOS development is concerned, branches are where
commits are pushed to die. They're not folded back into mainline
Chromium nor coreboot.org. We don't really have a good solution for
that.

If we spawn tons of branches every time something becomes a bit
inconvenient to deal with, we're quickly devolving into u-boot:
vendors will just start maintaining their own branches, and porting
high level features between those requires an immense amount of effort
because there are many years of divergence between them.
If you want a taste of that, try building something on Chromium's
chromeos-2013.04 branch and then port it to upstream master. And that
was just 2.5 years.

tl;dr: hiding problems in branches won't serve us long-term.


Patrick
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