On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 5:56 AM, Wookey wookey@wookware.org wrote:
+++ Dave Martin [2011-12-02 11:19 +0000]:
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 7:14 PM, David Zinman david.zinman@linaro.org wrote:
A request has been received to discontinue Linaro's support for the Beagleboard and Beagleboard-xM hardware.
Although they are starting to be replaced, Beagle and Beagle xM are particularly popular boards in the community at large. What is the rationale behind discontinuing support for these boards at this particular point in time? Will we still continue to produce best-effort "community" builds (as for some other boards)?
EOL-ing popular boards could weaken our links to the community, so we need to think carefully about it.
Indeed. Part of the benefit of Free Software is that you don't get support for hardware dropped at the whim of manufacturers who only care about their latest, greatest products.
Now of course linaro's focus is on the newer stuff to a large degree, not least because that's our member's focus and they are ultimately paying the bills, but we are primarily here as an interface between members and their corporate 'only the _next_ product counts' view of the world and the community/users/engineers who care about what they have on their desks, and getting work done with it.
So ideally, at this point we would have successfully upstreamed everything of significance on beagleboards and could leave it to others to maintain suitable distro support. Is that in fact the case? (I admit I haven't been following the details at all (I have, and thus only care about, nslu2/panda/n900/freerunner :-) )
It seems that both Debian and Ubuntu beagleboard installs are available: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardDebian http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu but it's not clear (to me) to what degree this support is in-distro. Should we be helping complete that work so that there really is proper in-distro support. I'm not convinced that our work is really done until that's the case, but we could declare that we only upstream stuff. distro-support is distro's problem.
Consider both those wiki's as more a guide for installing new boards & unsupported not yet mainline features for existing stable userspace... For the BeagleBoard specifically, this means the zippy1/2, trainer, and ulcd expansion boards work out of the box along with dsp support (via dspbridge). and as of this week, support for the new BeagleBone, which probably won't be enabled by Linaro/Canonical till 12.04/12.10..
We still ship a lot of BeagleBoard's, so i have no plans of dropping support on my end..
Regards,