[U-Boot] livetime of boards

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Heiko,

In message <527B7EE6.4030307 at denx.de> you wrote:
> 
> Hmm... I hope we get a lot of such EMails ... and think, this is not
> a big problem ... Or, maybe, if we get a lot of such EMails, maybe we
> open a u-boot-testing list?

NAK.  Mailing lists are good for some kind of information - especially
for such information that is read by humans.

All you want to do here is feed a database with data.  This is not
what mailing lists were made for, so we should really use a more
appropriate interface.

> See my proposal for the livetime counter:
> 
> livetime init value n (n=4)
> livetimer decrement on every new release
> livetimer set to n, if in release cycle comes a test report
> livetimer == 0 -> EMail to board maintainer, board reached end of live in
>                    mainline, please send test report.
> livetimer == -1 -> board get deleted

This is too simple in one respect (as you are not including
information that may be vital, like which exact commit ID has been
tested, or which tool chain has been used to build it).

Also we should probably not only allow for positive test reports, but
also allow to report failures (to mark board support as broken).

All this cannot be done in  boards.cfg .

And there is no need to as long as we provide tools to query for any
information we might be interested in.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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