Some time ago, I did a lot of work on getting a U-Boot + grub-efi-arm64
boot flow to work on the Raspberry Pi 4 with Debian. I was able to get
a proof-of-concept implementation to work correctly, and was interested
in upstreaming my work to Debian if it was welcome. To that end, I
attempted to reach the team taking care of Raspberry Pi support
maintenance in Debian in a few different ways. [1] [2] [3] [4] So far I
haven't gotten much of a response on any platform.
Obviously, I would like to see this feature in upstream Debian at some
point, which is why I did the work to see if it could be done. I'd like
to send patches to implement the feature. However, since I haven't
gotten any response (no explicit "this would be good, send a patch and
let's see what you have", no criticism or discussion, etc.), I don't
know how to proceed. I don't want to submit a patch and have it ignored
similar to the research and feature requests up to now. I also don't
want to just wait indefinitely before implementing patches.
I know that for bugfixes, the NMU process can be used to work around an
unresponsive maintainer, while still giving the maintainer time to take
a look and fix things if they'd like to. But for this kind of a feature
addition, I don't know if this is the right approach. As the Debian
Developer's Reference [5] says, "Using NMUs to make changes that are
likely to be non-consensual is discouraged."
What's a good way forward here? Am I trying to do something that
fundamentally shouldn't be done, or is there a good way for me to
contribute this feature?
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2025/04/msg00012.html
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/raspi-team/image-specs/-/issues/78
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1102607
[4] Also reached out via IRC, didn't get much of a response except one
person let me know about the existence of another UEFI
implementation for Raspberry Pi devices.
[5] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#when-and-how-to-do-an-nmu
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