Dear John Rigby,
In message BANLkTikMfdknySqnOe6KvGJpdK2bUxtiVQ@mail.gmail.com you wrote:
If you are discussing requirements for U-Boot, and plan to get these merged in to mainlineU-Boot one day, it would probably be a good idea to discuss these plans on the U-Boot mailing list as well - ideally before any design is cast in iron.
...
As you can see from this discussion, Linaro is considering applying resources (probably me) to upstreaming Android Fastboot features into mainline u-boot. What suggestions do you have for making this process as painless as possible?
I already wrote this above: discuss the _design_ early with the respective community. Don't define some design and implement it and then confront the community with your solution which you consider ready at this point: this is guaranteed to cause frustration, because you think you are done but we may think the design should be done differently and ask you to restart from scratch.
An implementation exists for omap4/panda on gitorious: git://gitorious.org/pandaboard/u-boot.git in the omap4_panda_es2.0 branch. There is also a version for omap3 somewhere else on gitorious.
Ah, cool. So we already have the situation I warned about above.
To bring this to mainline one would have to:
- Bring code up to current mainline revision.
- Fix any coding standards issues.
- Document the new features.
What else? I know one issue maybe why does this need to exist when other solutions exist. I think that since Android uses it, it is somewhat of a de facto standard.
Oh. Android uses it. It must be The Right Thing (TM), then, I guess. Probably like some of the Linux kernel code they use.
This is the killer argument I really like. Thank you very much.
I don't exactly feel motivated to accept just any stuff just because company A or project B uses it (even if they appear to be really big), or because already lots of efforts have been spent to implement something. On contrary. Usually an argumentation like that means that the design or the implementation are poor. Often both are.
It's 14 years or so that ESR formulated the RERO principle of software development; one could really think this is time enough to sink in. Alas, I know I'm an optimist...
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk