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Re: Areas of Emdebian to integrate into Debian



On Sun, 3 Apr 2011 17:33:43 +0100
David Goodenough <david.goodenough@btconnect.com> wrote:

> The problem is that without these patches, Debian in any form can not support
> these devices because the regular kernel is insufficient.

That much is obvious and identical to all the other board-specific
patches which are sitting around in thousands of VCS systems the world
over.

The problem is that expecting the kernel maintainers (Debian or
otherwise) to merge every single one of those - conflicts and all - is
unrealistic. The embedded community know which conflicts can be
resolved and how to merge the patches - better that the developers of
those patches work together than the patches bit rot in random VCS
locations and hold back updates to newer kernel versions.

Disparate teams of maintainers need to collate their kernel patches and
act as a community. If there's something Emdebian can do to support
that, fine, but it's NOT good for Emdebian to perpetuate the problems
by providing support tools which keep these patches separate. If
Emdebian is to get involved in kernel packages at all, it must be to
create a single kernel binary, built from a single patch set and which
will work on as many boards as possible, per arch. THAT could actually
help get our beloved patches into mainline for the longterm and that
has to be the objective.

I gave balloon as an example but it's only a small step in that it
collates patches for the various balloon variant boards.

Linaro is another possible contributor who may be able to provide some
infrastructure to support merging these patches. The effort should be
on creating a single patch set which supports as many boards and as
many variants as can be expected to run Debian, Emdebian or Yocto.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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