[U-Boot] [ANNOUNCE] Kconfig support

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Ladislav,

In message <20090422132536.GA2408 at localhost.localdomain> you wrote:
> 
> > What else should a maintainer do? He have not all boards to try the
> > new code! You can just look at Coding Style, clean compile and maybe
> > he see, that this Code couldn;t work ...
> 
> That's perfectly understandable. I'm just trying to point out, that
> "design flaws can be fixed incrementaly, without breaking anything"
> attitude does not reflect reality. We break stuff and noone can test

Please be fair. Re-read the whole discussion,  and  maybe  the  whole
mailing  list  archive.  Who  was  it  who claimed that this was some
(unwritten?) rule of U-Boot development?  It  is  very  difficult  to
defent  against malicious roumors like this, so I tend to just ignore
such accusations. Fact ist, they are just wrong.

> for all boards, so the real question is acceptable level of breakage
> we have to suffer from before deciding to try another approach. Just
> imagine amount of changes needed, amount of changes done over last year,
> amount of boards maintainers care about their board support since they
> pushed them into mainline and ask yourself a question how many boards
> can survive each such a change still functional. All the long time this
> slow evolution will happening, we will pretending ourselves that
> we did not break anything and everyone is happy.

Of course, board maintainers  are  supposed  to  regularly  test  new
versions,  and  ideally  provide  fixes  or  at  least complain about
breakage. Actually quite a lot of boards that cover a wide  bandwidth
of  different features and requirements *are* actually tested more or
less regularly.

There are broken boards around, too -  of  course.  There  are  those
board  maintainers  who  simply dump their stuff on us and then never
show up again with any contributions any more.

I don't know how we could prevent that. It's probably happening  with
any similar software project. For exampole, do you think all exisitng
board  configurations  in  the Linux kernel are working, or even com-
pile-clean?


Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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