Simon Glass's future with Das U-Boot project?

[Ilias Apalodimas]

Hi Tom,

On Thu, Jan 02, 2025 at 10:13:13AM -0600, Tom Rini wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> While I had hoped that the quiet of the last week or so had meant that
> things would perhaps return to how they had been before, Simon's large
> patch series and then comments on the TPM+bloblist patch have shown
> otherwise.
>
> At this point, I do not know how best to handle Simon's behavior,
> without soliciting feedback in public first. At best he's created a
> soft-fork of the project with his "sjg/master" branch. I've asked him
> repeatedly to explain how he thinks this is all going to work out, in
> public. I've had private conversations with him, but I want him to

Everyone is entitled to create a fork. But as noted in another mail, he
can't use the public mailing lists asking feedback for his forked patches,
nor can he use the public infra (incl patchwork) to test and maintain his
changes.

> explain in public. Or, he can post the messages if he likes.
>
> And I am in the process of getting outside help that would in turn be
> able to help the project move beyond the BDFL model we've always used.
> Because at the end of the day, if most of the active developers would
> prefer the direction Simon wants to take everything in, that's something
> I can accept.

+1 here. As long as patches get reviewed properly we should follow what the
majority thinks is the proper technical direction.

> But what's going on now is towards the worst end of
> possible outcomes I think for the project itself. And by that I mean,
> one prominent contributor steam-rolling over others and doing as the
> please and implicitly acting as an authoritative voice for the project.

I personally don't want to pay attention to out of tree patches.
Simon randomly responds to emails 'applied to sjg1/master' or something
along those lines, which further complicates things as people might think
their code got merged.

I think we should wait a few more days and give Simon a chance to respond
and perhaps explain what drove him to create his fork.

Regards
/Ilias
>
> --
> Tom