[U-Boot] U-Boot: Environment flags broken for U-Boot

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Tom,

In message <a78f0b04-c3f7-45d5-e9ac-90522dbefc2e at denx.de> Heiko Schocher wrote:
> 
> I am just testing U-Boot Environment flags and they do not work anymore with
> current mainline U-Boot ... 
...
> reason is your commit:
> 
> commit 7d4776545b0f8a8827e5d061206faf61c9ba6ea9
> Author: Patrick Delaunay <patrick.delaunay at st.com>
> Date:   Thu Apr 18 17:32:49 2019 +0200
> 
>      env: solve compilation error in SPL


Looking into the history of this, I wonder if we could / should
have prevented this.

As far as I can see, Patrick's patch series has not been reviewed by
others, probably because general intetest in STM32 is not that big
at the moment.  I can see no Acked-by:, Reviewed-by: nor Tested-by:
tags - nothing.

The whole patch series was then pulled from the u-boot-stm
repository.


However, there was not only STM related code in there.  There were
changes to common code like the environment handling.  common code
was changed without review and without testing.


Are there ways to prevent this?

Yes, we can appeal to the custodians to be more careful, but I
assume they are already doing their best.

It might have even been better if this had been a sub-system with a
clear maintainer, but there is no such person for the environment
code.

How can we prevent this in the future?

Should we define "interested developers" for such areas that have no
custodian (the "Designated reviewer") entry in the MAINTAINERS file
could be used for this, for example)?

Better ideas?

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,      Managing Director: Wolfgang Denk
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
To make this work we'd need a patch, as nobody of us tests this.
- L. Poettering in https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74589