On 2 December 2011 11:19, Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org wrote:
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.
The following conditions will be applied for the 2012.01 release cycle: * There will be no more LEB or Linaro Developer builds. * No more testing will be applied by Linaro to the boards at all, and no quality assurance will be performed. * No more bugs will be filed against these boards assigned to Linaro resources. * All currently filed bugs will be re-targeted to the appropriate community resource. * Landing team support is no longer needed or expected. * Linaro Release notes will no longer refer to Beagleboard.
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.
At a minimum, this decision needs a better rationale. Someone (who?) said so is about as bad as it cat get. There is talk about transparency in processes. This is not it.
Possibly the best way to anger a community is to force decisions on it without providing any explanations. This is exactly what is happening here, and it has to stop if Linaro is to be taken seriously as a member of the community.