[coreboot] How is depreciating 95% of coreboot boards worth it for such minor improvements?

[Felipe Sanches]

Is there an index of which was the latest git commit for each removed board
?
That would help anyone interested in working on them in the future. It is
not strictly necessary, but would certainly make life easier. And it can't
be that hard to update a wiki page (or something equivalent) any time
there's a new board deprecation.

2017-08-23 16:53 GMT-03:00 Nico Huber <nico.h at gmx.de>:

> Hi,
>
> On 23.08.2017 06:00, Taiidan at gmx.com wrote:
> > Just because a board lacks active developers doesn't mean that no one is
> > using it.
>
> right, and we won't stop anybody from using them in the future. Please
> keep in mind, when a board is removed from the tree that only means that
> the people working on newer boards don't maintain the old ones any more.
> You can still check out the parent of the removal commit and build these
> boards. I don't know which boards exactly are in question, but older
> board ports are often broken anyway. So you can't argue that keeping
> them in the tree would magically make them work.
>
> > As a layman I simply can't understand as to how all these seemingly
> > insignificant improvements such as CBMEM in ramstage make it worth
> > removing almost every compatible board from the source,
>
> I agree that these improvements would be insignificant to the boards in
> question. Though, making improvements at all for newer platforms is much
> harder if you have to take care of the old platforms (with incompatible
> code) too.
>
> > including nearly
> > all the models that still have an open source init.
>
> Can I see numbers please? I count about 50 Intel based boards (not
> counting variants) with free init code which is actively developed.
> There are more on the ARM front and probably some AMD based too. They'll
> all stay. How many are we going to remove?
>
> > To me it seems at the rate this is going soon all that will be left is a
> > few blobbed and NDA'ed development boards unavailable to the general
> > public.
>
> What rate? how many have we removed already? 2? If you estimate from
> that and the prospect that we'll remove 50+ one year later, well, then
> we'd remove 1,000+ boards next year. That would indeed be a problem...
>
> >
> > Am I mistaken?
>
> Yes, I guess.
>
> Nico
>
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>
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