On 12/02/2011 10:02 PM, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
On 2 December 2011 13:31, Andy Green<andy.gr...@linaro.org> wrote:
On 12/02/2011 08:21 PM, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
On 2 December 2011 11:19, Dave Martin<dave.mar...@linaro.org> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 7:14 PM, David Zinman<david.zin...@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.
I can give a good rationale for generally keeping some pressure up to limit
the number of supported boards, it's very difficult to provide good quality
over multiple platforms. We at the LT had quite a big shock with 4460 Panda
which has much more restricted changes than between OMAP3 and OMAP4, it
doubled our test load and led to a lot of problems for a while.
All the LTs will get next-gen stuff to work on in the coming months, some
clearing of the decks to limit the scale we have to cover will be a very
good idea....
See, that wasn't so hard. If manpower is the issue, just say so. People
can understand that. Arbitrary-looking decisions handed down from
management without explanation they cannot. This is how many companies
create a very clear separation of classes among their employees, the
privileged management on one side, and the engineering plebs on the
other. Is this how Linaro wants to be?
This is OT but Linaro has been like that for a while, it's not set up as
a co-op or a kibbutz but a distributed tech company with > 100 engineers
spread all over. It's really quite hierarchical, has its own HR
department, the lot.
if BB is to go then probably igep should go the same way.
There's no point just having them there in name only but they're
second-class citizens for actual work and test (OMAP3 has never had any TI
LT attention for example).
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.
I am not sure that's a usable consideration for making the decision. I
think the question is, is providing these builds and doing the work on that
platform still moving Linaro and the vendor's interests forward, or is the
time better spent on supporting future products early and making a bigger
difference there.
I'm not saying the community needs to be considered in making every decision.
However, if Linaro wants to be seen as, even partially, being part of the
community, decisions such as this need to be given some justification beyond
"someone said so". Alternatively, Linaro could stop pretending to care about
the community at all. Being seen as dishonest is far worse than simply not
caring.
Yeah it won't hurt to explain the general reasoning along with the
proposal. But I don't know really how much that reasoning will be
responsive to individual annoyance at it.
I think if Linaro provides value for people in a way that makes sense
for them to take up, they'll take it up and what you're maybe thinking
of as a community will form naturally for the duration. What's valuable
changes over time and we need to take care to continue to be relevant in
the end to have a community (or a business) over time.
-Andy
--
Andy Green | TI Landing Team Leader
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