[flashrom] Future flashrom development

[Nico Huber]

Dear flashrom contributors,

you might have noticed that there hasn't been a release of flashrom in
the past 1.5 years. That doesn't mean that there wasn't any progress,
though. Development has continued and some patches were merged into a
common branch [1]. Alas, not in the `stable` branch of the official
repository. I'd rather not discuss now, why (it's complicated).

As the original plan was to have two separate branches `stable` and
`staging` anyway [2] and we finally got the first commit for `stable`
together (which was stalling the branch), I thought it would be a good
idea to move the already baked and tested commits from `staging` to
`stable`.

Sadly, even this got stalled again. Plus, there is doubt if the two
branches model is feasible at all:

  * How to maintain patch compatibility between them?
  * Should everything be first submitted to `staging`?
  * If not, who'd be allowed to decide to push directly to `stable`
    and why?
  * ...

So I propose the following: Forget the two branches model, start
a `master` branch with either the current state of `staging` or
my proposed move to `stable` [3] and release flashrom-1.0 right
away.

Submission to the current `staging` branch took place within core-
boot's Gerrit infrastructure. As for myself, I would like to con-
tinue that for any flashrom branch. IMO, it works reasonably well
to work on a branch together. Though, I know that not everybody is
happy with Gerrit and am open for anything else that doesn't incur
a bottleneck.

Thoughts?

Nico

[1] `staging` on https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/flashrom.git

[2] https://www.flashrom.org/Development_Guidelines#Branches

[3] The result if somebody submits the following patch queue:

https://review.coreboot.org/#/q/status:open+branch:stable+owner:"Nico Huber"