[U-Boot-Users] U-Boot Developer's Information

[Wolfgang Denk]

Hello everybody.

the  number  of  contributions  to  the  U-Boot  project   has   been
continuously  growing,  and  for some time I've been looking for more
efficient ways to deal with all  the  patches  and  submissions.  The
current   development   cycle   with  a  central  CVS  repository  at
SourceForge has a couple of problems:

* SF is slow, and it takes sometimes pretty long until check-ins  are
  visible  to  the public. If the CVS server at SF is down, the whole
  U-Boot development stalls.

* CVS is cumbersome to use when it comes to handling branches. So far
  we avoided branches in U-Boot  completely,  with  the  result  that
  several  interesting  contributions were blocked for a long time to
  avoid de-stabilization of the only branch we had -  often  so  long
  until  the patches were not applicable any more. Many other patches
  and contributions got delayed because of this for a long time, too.

* Every new commit to the only  branch  needed  at  least  a  certain
  amount of testing, so preparing the tree for a "release" was always
  pretty  challenging. This resulted in long delays between releases,
  which in turn caused many people to use old code as  base  for  new
  work which called for trouble later.

U-Boot Version 1.1.3, which was released on August 14, 2005, was the
last release following this old development cycle.


Big changes are coming.


U-Boot Source Repository:
=========================

Starting immediately, we use git (see http://git.or.cz/) as  software
configuration management (SCM) tool for U-Boot development.

Please see http://source.denx.net/en/Documents/GitDocs for  some
introductory  information  for  git.


The "master repository" for U-Boot is available from

	rsync://source.denx.net/git/u-boot.git
or       http://source.denx.net/git/u-boot.git

The CVS repository at SourceForge will be kept in sync with  the  git
tree,  but there is no guarantee how long I will do this, so it's use
is deprecated. Use git, or feel free to use one of  the  'porcelains'
like cogito on top of git.

[FYI: SourceForge considers it "not an immediate priority" to host
and support git based repositories.]


Submitting Patches:
===================