Proposal for further openmoko kernel development

[Nelson Castillo]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Lars-Peter Clausen<lars at metafoo.de> wrote:
(cut)
> I also suggest to rebase our trees every major upstream release onto the new
> upstream, to keep up with the latest changes in upstream and again to keep
> the patchset maintainable.
> On the other hand I'm not an git expert and there might be other better
> approaches, so feel free to send suggestions.

I don't think that having many trees is a good thing but I'm not GIT
expert either and I haven't felt the pain you felt with the rebases.
They might help with the kernel up-leveling but it feels a bit weird.

> The benefit of this approach compared to the current model is that we have a
> clean set of patches for each subsystem which makes rebasing and possible
> upstream submission a lot easier. Furthermore this clearly defines who is
> responsible for what. With the current model we have 3 or 4 people who have
> access to git, but there hasn't been any agreement about what should be done
> by whom. Which as a result has led to some confusion in the past, with none
> committing potential patches.

I think that the current policy is : Better to ask for forgiveness
than for permission :-)

> Nelson would probably regain his position as the "gate keeper", who as a
> maintainer decides what goes into the machine trees.

I don't think this would be a good thing. First it's not OK to
centralize the decisions and second I do not really feel comfortable
deciding what goes and what does not when I don't really understand
what is going on :-) For many of the patches that come to the list all
I can say is "thank you". Someone who knows more about the Linux
kernel should be a better fit  for this task. For instance Werner but
he doesn't like the centralized approach either.

> I do have patches against 2.6.31 for full gta02 support which could be used
> to initialize the trees to get them functional.

Oh! Where do you have them? It would be nice to check them to see if
we can get a few more patches upstream. Russell said we have about 15
more days of merge window so this weekend might be a good opportunity
to send missing patches.

I hope to check 2.6.31 status this weekend. If someone has made 2.6.31
boot please report and let us know.

Regards.