BSP maintenance (was Re: set_vector() on SPARC)

[Sebastian Huber]

On 21/10/2020 04:06, Chris Johns wrote:

>> Those who are not in constant testing... well they are not tier 1, right?
> Yes but how does that fit in with idea of "being maintained" or "not being
> maintained" and under what terms do we accept changes to BSPs and the interfaces
> they use?
>
> I suppose I am after some guidelines to help us manage expectations. We have the
> expectations of developers making changes and those reviewing patches and we
> have our users. Do we explained to our users that keeping RTEMS current and
> modern means we may break BSPs and drivers? Do we explain we are in dark with
> BSPs we do not see hardware test results for? I d not think we do. I am
> wondering if doing so may feedback into how we maintain BSPs. Would we be more
> aggressive with changes if we know a lack of test results for a BSP a user is
> vested in may require extra support overheads to make work again?
>
> I am attempting to see if can move from this being subjective to it reflecting
> what we have. I would also like have it clearly understood by our users that
> testing on hardware is the only means we have to know things work.

I suggested a while ago to add a section to the MAINTAINERS file which 
covers the maintenance state of RTEMS components. Something similar to 
what Linux has:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/MAINTAINERS#L80

I consider the bfin and sh targets for example as clearly unmaintained.