[OpenWrt-Devel] [RFC] stop accepting 4/32M board patches

[Piotr Dymacz]

Hi Mathias,

On 05.12.2018 09:56, Mathias Kresin wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> I would like to start to reject patches for adding boards with only 32
> MByte of RAM and 4 MByte of flash [0]. These boards barely work with
> todays OpenWrt default builds and require quite some modifications to be
> useful at all [1].

In general I agree but I still consider OpenWrt more like a platform 
than a ready Linux distribution. For me this means that even if snapshot 
or release images are missing for some devices because of their limited 
resources, thanks to keeping basic support for them in code base, users 
are still able to make use of them. There are already devices in repo 
which didn't get official image for 18.06 release but now have snapshot 
images and can be even more useful with a custom/self made image.

> IMHO it doesn't make much sense to waste resources (reviewer time, build
> resources) for boards which will most likely never see an official build
> and/or are more or less unusable with the official build.

In case of DTS based targets (where single device support in code 
doesn't have that big impact like in, for example, ar71xx) and good 
quality patch/PR I don't see a reason to not merge the support. And in 
case the official snapshot/release build can't fit in available flash 
space and we are really worried about build resources, we can just 
disable image generation for the device. This way, users and downstream 
projects would be still able to make use of OpenWrt on resource-limited 
devices without the need to maintain custom device support patches.

> I prefer to have a joint statement which I can link to, to prevent
> endless discussions or accusations of acting purely arbitrary.

Instead of making this a strict rule now I would prefer to leave final 
decision to the developer who takes care of patch/PR _and_ establish a 
clear dead line for this to become a strict rule. Lets say: after 19.06 
release we no longer accept support patches for devices with only 4 MB 
of flash or 32 MB of RAM.

> I'm not sure whether the topic qualifies for a formal voting, hence the RFC.

Thanks for bringing up this topic.

-- 
Cheers,
Piotr

_______________________________________________
openwrt-devel mailing list
openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel