Hi Tom,
On 5/28/25 19:59, Tom Rini wrote:
Hey all,
First, I am not happy to be writing this email. But at this point, I
feel I have no other choice, for the good of the overall project and
community.
Back in January[0] of this year I made a post with almost this same
subject line. At that point there had already been a number of problems
working with Simon and the overall community. I did not include a list
of links. At that point the easiest answer would be to go to the mailing
list archive, pick any thread that Simon and I had and see the long
disagreements. This trend has fundamentally not changed. And while I
started this out with some threads and my summaries of them, instead I
want to point to this email I sent this mornig:
https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/20250528170533.GE100073@bill-the-cat/
And to repeat what I said there, Simon needs to decide if it's more
important to work with the community or have his way every time. Simon
cannot have both. Simon needs to accept that some things he think are
good ideas have been rejected or he needs to fork off from U-Boot. Or he
can ask the community to take over as the project head. If the community
wants Simon to run things, I will step down and just be an individual
contributor again. Five months of this experiment shows me that it's not
working at all and will only be a bigger problem as time goes on.
And, I mean it. I cannot take the additional stress of what new problems
await me every morning. I do not take the above lightly, but I do not
think the project can become healthy moving forward without some
resolution here and quickly. While I won't claim my time as the head of
the project has been perfect, I have tried my best to always be honest
and fair and to seek compromise.
You've been nothing but encouraging to me as a new contributor and
custodian, and I really can't imagine U-Boot without you leading the charge.
Simon has been repeatedly engaging with people unproductively, wasting
time and delaying valuable contributions. His complains tend to come in
the form of vague hand waving about how things should be with seemingly
no attention given to the actual intentions of the patch and dealing
with the reality of how U-Boot works today. With so much attention given
to his ever-diverging fork I can only imagine increasing confusion about
how U-Boot actually works when it comes to reviewing upstream patches.
Referring back to:
https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/1c1bcd1e-bec5-4e6a-9f09-e1d289596...@linaro.org/
Simon seems to think that his arbitrary *implementation* of a boot flow
is the only correct design, and there is no other usecase where
something else would be desirable.
After many repeated discussions with the same themes (and having
witnessed many of yours) I struggle to see Simons engagements as
anything other than bad faith, particularly when it's so hard to pin
down what the technical disagreements here actually are.
The patches in Simons U-Boot fork all appear to be either picked from
the list (often earlier versions that what actually made it upstream) by
other folks or his own patches that have been rejected for totally valid
reasons that he doesn't seem to want to get into good enough shape to
upstream.
You have repeatedly and publicly explained what it would take to get his
features merged upstreamed, and to be honest I think you have offered
him far more grace than other people in your position would.
With respect to voting, would anyone volunteer to run a poll from
https://civs1.civs.us/ (which is used by the Yocto Project /
OpenEmbedded and likely other FOSS projects/communities) ?
Maybe rather than this we could form a U-Boot board (via voting) and
this board would be responsible for managing the project and associated
resources, having and enforcing a code of conduct, etc etc.
There are various organisations which can help with this like the Linux
Foundation, NLNet (I have experience with this from postmarketOS) and it
would give the U-Boot community a way to be represented when it comes to
difficult situations like this as well as provide a way for the project
to grow sustainable as it increases in scope.
--
Casey (she/they)
