[U-Boot] [ANNOUNCE] Kconfig support

[Robert Schwebel]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 02:29:32PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> [stupid attempt of a flame war deleted]

For the audience which is wondering about what's going on here, I have
no idea.

The idea behind B-Boot-v2 is: U-Boot itself is a *great* bootloader from
the user's poing of view. It is the best thing we have in the open
source market place, and it is especially *much* better than all the
redboots, grubs whatever.

When we started the v2 effort, we saw that U-Boot has a problem with
it's inner design. It was great when the U-Boot project started, but it
has (successfully) grown over the years, and as with every project that
has not been reworked over more than a decade, it is almost impossible
to fix design decisions without breaking all the boards out there. Yes,
it works with the Linux kernel, but compare the size of the communities.

So our intention was and is:

1. Wolfgang has a focus on stability and gradual changes. We respect this
   political position because it is a *good* one.

2. We need something else four our ARM, PowerPC, Blackfin and x86
   projects. The technical features I'm talking about are in the README
   document. The focus is on a modern design, extensability and
   testability, not on feature completeness.

3. It was an active decision from our team *not* to fork and call it
   something else than U-Boot(-v2) when we started. We see that the
   U-Boot community is strong, it has long term aims and last but not
   least, it has a *great* bootloader. We talked to Wolfgang before
   doing so, and Wolfgang's position was in the spirit of "go ahead,
   here is a git tree, and let the community decide".

4. v2 has been designed with much of the technical ideas of modern Linux
   kernels in mind; most probably v1 would have done the same if it had
   started 10 years later. So we think our work fits perfectly into the
   spirit of the U-Boot project.

4. Yes, community splitup is bad. But if one community has overlapping
   aims which can be worked on under the same roof - why on earth should
   we not do this?

5. It may happen that the v1 people take features from v2 and bring them
   into v1 over the time. Great than - v2 would have done it's job then.

6. It may happen that the v2 community grows over the time and more and
   more boards will be added. Great then - users would have a choice
   *within* the U-Boot community, up to a gradual change to the new code
   base.

What ever will happen - I don't see *any* reason for whatever Mike is
trying to enforce here.

rsc
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