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

[Aaron Durbin]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 2:06 PM, Felipe Sanches <juca at members.fsf.org> wrote:
> 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.

Keep in mind that branches exist for each release which inherently has
the full history at time of release:

$ git ls-remote upstream refs/heads/*
6cb3a59fd5e754c3627b79db21c5bcc284bfd721        refs/heads/4.1
ad342a4589df6c51c96c1e9110979964b244fec3        refs/heads/4.2
1bf5e6409678d04fd15f9625460078853118521c        refs/heads/4.3
588ccaa9a7d94da4f5a5b3579eb9e3d06c9f4a51        refs/heads/4.4
c21e07385f9b4048d6ddb67989b23999f566951d        refs/heads/classic-2014.10
e9418b454f6d2734360ca4e3c017f59904490d9f        refs/heads/coreboot-v1
25d77ad675f8bac8fd7e038801c72797ea8dc7d6        refs/heads/coreboot-v3
4fcce9da0a1b62b46ed78c522f6fcbf51ff5974e        refs/heads/foo2
f5fe3590af9a67f9fd3adaee85168d3cac0d84d0        refs/heads/master


>
> 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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