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

[Patrick Georgi]

2015-10-28 14:50 GMT+01:00 Aaron Durbin <adurbin at google.com>:
> That presupposes there is work going on in those branches that is
> desired to be pushed back into another branch. Anyone can very much
> port forward something if they so choose. That's the point of the
> branching mechanism.
>
> What is your proposal for dealing w/ inconvenience? I haven't seen a
> modicum of change in that area. In fact, what we have seen is more
> boards being added that use the constructs that are inconvenient.
For one: when things are considered too inconvenient (and used and
maintained) to be practical to keep around, remove them. For real.
Claiming that we can stuff them "in branches" is a cop-out, because
they're still dead.

That's also why I proposed to go with tags for releases: When people
are motivated enough to dig out the old stuff and make it work again,
there should be some incentive to bring them up to current standards.
Then they can get back into master.
If somebody is spearheading such an effort and provides test
resources, I think there's even some willingness to help with some of
the more mechanical tasks - like cleaning out #include "file.c" stuff,
but the motivation is rather hard to get by when it's unclear if the
code is ever used again.

People can still take any old commit (tagged, branched, or not) and do
their own thing on github - however I think we're setting standards by
what we do. Opening branches encourages to keep basing work on them,
instead of considering snapshots to be just that.

My main objection to dropping things was that the motivation by the
proponents always looked very similar to "this is inconvenient to me
right now, let's get rid of this".
If we were consequential in following up every such sentiment by
everyone, we'd probably ship a single file, COPYING.


Patrick
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