Old platforms: bring out your dead

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 1:33 AM Russell King - ARM Linux admin
<linux at armlinux.org.uk> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 10:33:56PM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 7:16 PM Fabian Vogt <fabian at ritter-vogt.de> wrote:
> > > Am Samstag, 9. Januar 2021, 23:20:48 CET schrieb Arnd Bergmann:
> > > (https://lore.kernel.org/linux-arm-kernel/20190805085847.25554-1-linus.walleij@linaro.org)
> > > was the biggest required change so far.
> >
> > What we're seeing here is actually a port that is:
> > - Finished
> > - Has a complete set of working drivers
> > - Supported
> > - Just works
> >
> > I.e. it doesn't see much patches because it is pretty much perfect.
> >
> > We are so unused to this situation that it can be mistaken for
> > the device being abandoned.
> >
> > I think it was Russell who first pointed out that this is actually
> > the case for a few machines.
>
> Yes indeed. I find it utterly rediculous that there is a perception
> that you constantly need to be patching a bit of software for it to
> not be seen as abandoned. If a piece of software works and does what
> it needs to do, why does it need to be continually patched? It makes
> no sense to me.

I don't know where you got the impression that this is what I
want to do. I used this as a first approximation because it reduced
the number of platforms to look at from 71 to under 20, just by
looking at what patches went into the kernel. I could further get the
number down to the 14 platforms listed in this email by knowing
some of the users of platforms that did not see a lot of updates but
are well supported, like highbank or dove.

We have already confirmed axxia, digicolor, kona and nspire
as platforms that we want to keep for now, and a new volunteer
to maintain axxia, and I did not get the impression that any of
the maintainers were overly stressed out by being sent an
email inquiry five years after the last contact. I would prefer
an occasional Tested-by tag for the cleanup patches that did make
it in (yes, I counted those as activity), but I understand that
everyone is busy and these are low-maintenance platforms.

> I have my xf86-video-armada which I use on the Dove Cubox and iMX6
> platforms. It does what I need it to, and I haven't updated the
> userspace on these platforms for a while. Therefore, I've no reason
> to patch that code, and no one has sent me patches. Does that mean
> it's abandoned? Absolutely not.

I listed the dove platform in the first table specifically because the
plan back in 2014 was to completely remove the platform once that
hardware is working with the modern mach-mvebu platform, and
I hoped that the transition had finished by now.

      Arnd