[meta-freescale] [for-danny][RFT] Danny bugfixes/improvements from master

[Eric Bénard]

Hi Otavio,

Le Sat, 16 Feb 2013 18:46:55 -0200,
Otavio Salvador <otavio at ossystems.com.br> a écrit :
> On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 6:20 PM, Eric Bénard <eric at eukrea.com> wrote:
> > Le Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:41:34 -0200,
> > Otavio Salvador <otavio at ossystems.com.br> a écrit :
> >> Those are all available at 'danny-next' branch and it fixes many
> >> issues found since the branching and also does upgrade some BSP
> >> packages to 1.1.0.
> >>
> > please don't remove 12.09.01 recipes in danny : this is a stable
> > release so please don't break users' layers which could have bbappend
> > on the actual recipes.
> > The goal of a release branch is to make a snapshot of what is stable
> > at the day of the release and then to get only fixes, not to track
> > everything which goes into master.
> 
> Part of me agrees with you; part does not.
> 
> I agree that the upgrade to 1.1.0 might break some users BSP at same
> time the BSP has been upgraded by Freescale due they've fixed known
> issues and those might be important to customers. So we have a
> dead-lock here :-)
> 
problem is that this will break any bbappend and any patch peoples may
have in their layers for their custom boards which are based on danny
and so on 12.09.01.

IMHO, a stable branch is the snapshot of versions which are considered
to be stable at the date of the release. During the stable branch's
life, if updates or bug fixes are available for the versions _already_
in the stable branch you can of course apply them to the stable branch.
12.09.01 was considered to be stable at the time of the danny release
and allows to generate a working configuration for i.MX6 when 1.1.0
was released after danny was created as a stable branch and thus is the
right BSP to use for the _next_ stable branch.

If a stable branch is a branch which can get all the upgrades from
master whenever a BSP is upgraded, then you will always have good
reason to pick up any patch from master so a stable branch is not
necessary and it is better to say to users : we are a moving target, if
you want stability, stick to a commit hash and not to a branch (or
create your own branch based on master and cherry-pick the patches you
want).
Of course you can argue there may not be many users of the stable
branch (and certainly even less with i.MX6 boards), but you already
thought that at the time of denzil and that broke at least 2 i.MX53 BSP
I maintain for 2 different customers which were based on denzil so yes,
there can be some users of the stable branches of meta-fsl-arm.
If you merge 1.1.0 in danny, the problem is the message you send to
users : you need to warn people that meta-fsl-arm's stable branches can
receive major upgrades and thus break their own layers so that users
can take their responsibility and choose either to work on a fixed
commit hash or to fork meta-fsl-arm for their own project.

If you do a git diff master danny-next you will see there is nearly no
reason to have 2 branches ;-)

Eric