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Enforcement of coding standards

U-Boot-Users Jerry Van Baren 3 participants 4 messages Mar 7, 2003 – Mar 8, 2003 1 message not in the archive

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A message that is not in the archive (sent off-list or not yet received): [email protected]

Jerry Van Baren

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#1 lore raw

The technical term for this is "bit-rot" and it is an immutable law of software, a manifestation of entropy ;-).

gvb

Quoted 11 lines · r.schwebel at pengutronix.de
Quoted 2 lines · Wolfgang Denk

But then - look at the MAINTAINERS file for the long list of orphaned boards. What do we do with those?

Hmm, if nobody maintains a port any more he cannot hope that it will work on forever. From time to time this has to be checked. Surely, nobody will break other people's boards by intention, but on the other hand nobody can expect that changes don't affect a board over a longer development time, especially when large changes like the u-boot merge are done.

Quoted 7 lines

Robert
--
Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de
Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry
Braunschweiger Str. 79, 31134 Hildesheim, Germany
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686

    Phone: +49-5121-28619-0 |  Fax: +49-5121-28619-4

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#2 lore raw
Quoted 2 lines · In message <[email protected]> you wrote:

The technical term for this is "bit-rot" and it is an immutable law of software, a manifestation of entropy ;-).

This is not exactly the case here. Actually most of these boards are actively used by quite a lot of people, see for example the Walnut board or the FADS8xx or the MPC8260ADS or the RPX{Classic,lite,super} boards.

It's just that a number of active users does not automatically create an active maintainer.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

Signature · 3 lines
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-4596-87  Fax: (+49)-8142-4596-88  Email: wd at denx.de
The software required `Windows 95 or better', so I installed Linux.
#3 lore raw
Quoted 7 lines · Wolfgang Denk

This is not exactly the case here. Actually most of these boards are actively used by quite a lot of people, see for example the Walnut board or the FADS8xx or the MPC8260ADS or the RPX{Classic,lite,super} boards.

It's just that a number of active users does not automatically create an active maintainer.

Yes, but when people are using a board it means that somebody must have maintained it until one version, and that one definitely works. I don't think it's realistic to hope that all boards that once have worked will do forever, without anybody testing it. And there's also no problem in people using old versions of software, if it works for them.

Robert

Signature · 5 lines
 Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de
 Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry
   Braunschweiger Str. 79,  31134 Hildesheim, Germany
   Handelsregister:  Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686
    Phone: +49-5121-28619-0 |  Fax: +49-5121-28619-4
#4 lore raw
Quoted 3 lines · In message <[email protected]> you wrote:

Yes, but when people are using a board it means that somebody must have maintained it until one version, and that one definitely works. I don't

I wish it were so. But it ain't. Some features were never implmented right on some boards. And nobody cares - at least not enough to start working on it.

But this is a non-issue for this discussion.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

Signature · 6 lines
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-4596-87  Fax: (+49)-8142-4596-88  Email: wd at denx.de
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