[U-Boot] [ANNOUNCE] Kconfig support

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Sascha,

In message <20090421223025.GA21747 at pengutronix.de> you wrote:
>
> sha at octopus:~/octopus/u-boot/u-boot find board -name "flash.c" | wc -l
> 201
> sha at octopus:~/octopus/u-boot/u-boot find board -name "config.mk"| wc -l
> 411
> 
> So nearly half of the boards in U-Boot seem to be unmaintained since the
> advent of the generic flash driver five years ago.

I disagree with your interpretation. Why should aboard maintainer
change running code without need? We never asked to change the flash
driver of existing boards because there was no need for doing this.
So why should anybody spend efforts to change these?

> How can you possibly ever change the API for the flash driver with 201
> different flash drivers in the tree without marking something as broken?

Well, *if* we wanted to change the API, that would be a reason to get
rid of the old legacy flash drivers. But so far no  such  API  change
has  been  necessary.  And  here  and  there the old drivers are even
necessary due to restrictions of the CFI driver that are not too easy
to fix.

So what exactly is it you are critizising? That we don't abondon
working code just because it is old? Hm...

> One of these boards is the Auerswald Innokom, a board Robert once
> ported. We probably still have it somewhere @Pengutronix, but nobody in
> the world has any interest in running a top of tree U-Boot on it. Still
> it is in the tree and by policy it has to be supported for all eternity.

Feel free to submit patches to remove it from the tree if you care.

On the other hand - how much effort was  actually  spent  on  keeping
this  board  alive?  Obviously  not  much, because so far nobody com-
plained about it. Actually that's the whole idea about having a board
in mainline. If you look at the changes  that  were  applied  to  the
related  files,  it's  all stuff that was done 99% automatically with
some scripts - and I don't really care if these  are  applied  to  20
boards or to 200.


I fail to understand what you are trying to tell us.


Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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