[U-Boot] [STATUS] "Quality" of patches / testing.

[Anton Staaf]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 11:23 PM, Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> the patches that have been submitted for this release turn out to of
> of shockingly bad quality.  About every other batch of patches I apply
> will break building not only for a single board r a few boards, but
> for large numbers of boards, including whole processor families and
> even whole architectures.
>
> Not to mention the huge number of patches that have to be rejected
> because they raise tons or errors and warnings from checkpatch.pl
>
>
> The time I have available is limited even without such avoidable
> problems, and I really, really rather spend it on constructive work
> instead of continuously running git bisect to track down the culprits.
>
> What's even worse is that it appears that I am the only person in this
> whole community who runs any build tests.  Or how comes that it's
> always me who detects such build breakages?
>
>
> Note # 3 at http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot/Patches says:
>
>        Before sending the patch, you must run the MAKEALL script on
>        your patched source tree and make sure that no errors or
>        warnings are reported for any of the boards. Well, at least
>        not any more warnings than without your patch.
>
>        It is strongly recommended to verify that out-of-tree building
>        (with "-O" make option resp. "BUILD_DIR" environment variable)
>        is still working. For example, run:
>
>        $ BUILD_DIR=/tmp/u-boot-build ./MAKEALL
>
> Why is nobody doing this?

I would like to start a thread addressing this question.  I don't think
the people submitting are running MAKEALL because it has a very high
barrier to entry.  In particular I spent a few days trying to get as
many architecture toolchains up and running as I could so that I could
run MAKEALL to fully test my builds.  The result was frustrating.  I
was only able to get ARM to build (Our local toolchain works, but I also
got the ELDK toolchain to work for me).  I was not able to get the ELDK
toolchain for PowerPC to work however.

-Anton

Ahh, looks like Mike agrees...

> I cannot continue like that.  We need to find ways to improve the
> quality of the submitted patches, and to distribute the work load for
> testing.
>
> I need your help.
>
>
> Thanks.
>
> Wolfgang Denk
>
> --
> DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
> HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
> Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
> There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight  line  if  the
> axis are chosen correctly.
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