[U-Boot] [U-Boot-Custodians] [U-Boot-Board-Maintainers] [ANN] U-Boot v2019.07-rc4 released

[Simon Glass]

Hi Marek,


On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 11:10, Marek Vasut <marex at denx.de> wrote:
>
> On 6/24/19 3:56 PM, Simon Glass wrote:
> > Hi Andreas,,
> >
> > On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 20:49, Andreas Färber <afaerber at suse.de> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi Simon,
> >>
> >> Am 22.06.19 um 21:14 schrieb Simon Glass:
> >>> On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 20:08, Andreas Färber <afaerber at suse.de> wrote:
> >>>> Am 22.06.19 um 20:15 schrieb Simon Glass:
> >>>>> On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 16:10, Andreas Färber <afaerber at suse.de> wrote:
> >>>>>> Am 22.06.19 um 16:55 schrieb Simon Glass:
> >>>>>>> I'd like to better understand the benefits of the 3-month timeline.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> It takes time to learn about a release, package and build it, test it on
> >>>>>> various hardware, investigate and report errors, wait for feedback and
> >>>>>> fixes, rinse and repeat with the next -rc. Many people don't do this as
> >>>>>> their main job.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> If we shorten the release cycle, newer boards will get out faster (which
> >>>>>> is good) but the overall quality of boards not actively worked on
> >>>>>> (because they were working good enough before) will decay, which is bad.
> >>>>>> The only way to counteract that would be to automatically test on real
> >>>>>> hardware rather than just building, and doing that for all these masses
> >>>>>> of boards seems unrealistic.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Here I think you are talking about distributions. But why not just
> >>>>> take every second release?
> >>>>
> >>>> You're missing my point: What good is it to do a release when you
> >>>> yourself consider it of such poor quality that you advise others not to
> >>>> take it?
> >>>
> >>> Who said that?
> >>
> >> You, quoted above. In response to my concerns about decreasing quality
> >> you suggested to take only every second release. That doesn't improve
> >> the quality of either. It implies that one may have such bad quality
> >> that people should skip it and yet does nothing to improve the next.
> >
> > Actually I did not say that I consider the release of such poor
> > quality. Nor did I advise others to take it. I suspect this is a
> > misunderstanding of "But why not just take every second release?".
> >
> > My point was that if people don't have time to test every release,
> > then just put in the time to test every second release.
>
> So what about be the point of releasing the untested intermediate
> release at all ? I'm sure people can just grab u-boot/master or -rc2
> just fine.

Because (I contend) these releases do actually attract testing effort
and are stable in most cases. I think this is the 90/10 rule - we are
adding a road-block in the project for the 10% of boards that are
super, super important...so important that no one can actually find
time to test them :-)

Regards,
Simon