The future of DT binding maintainership

[David Gibson]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 04:46:47AM +0100, Grant Likely wrote:
> A number of us had a face-to-face meeting in Dublin last week to talk
> about DT maintainership and the fact that it simply isn't working right
> now. Neither Rob nor I can keep up with the load and there are a lot of
> poorly designed bindings appearing in the tree.
> 
> Device tree binding maintainership needs to be split off to a separate
> group, and we've started with a few people willing to help, Pawel Moll,
> Mark Rutland, Stephen Warren and Ian Campbell.
> 
> (BTW, even though I've already sent a patch adding that group
> MAINTAINERS, this is not set in stone. Anyone else wanting to help
> maintain should volunteer)

Sounds good.

> Another thing discussed is that we need to start validating DT schema
> with an extension to dtc. Tomasz Figa has volunteered to do this work
> and has support from his employer to spend time on it. What I'm hoping
> to have is that the DT schema will get checked as part of the dts build
> process so that any DT file that doesn't match the documented schema
> will get flagged, and that the schema files will be human readable and
> will double as documentation.

Tomasz, please keep me in the loop on this.  This sounds like exactly
what the "checks" infrastructure in dtc was designed for, but I never
had time to implement very much there.  I'd definitely like to follow
progress here, though.

> There is not yet any process for binding maintainership. We talked about
> a few ideas, but they really need to be hashed out here on the mailing
> list. A couple of the questions:
> 
> - How are bindings allowed to be merged? Through subsystem trees, or
>   only through the bindings tree?
>   - Through the bindings tree is more work but it will provide more
>     control.
>   - Through subsystem trees means drivers and bindings get merged
>     together.
>   - If we have a schema tool that reports errors on missing or
>     unapproved schema, then spliting the driver from the binding won't
>     matter that much.
> - Do we need to differentiate between 'staging' and 'stable' bindings?
> - What is the schedule for splitting the bindings and .dts files out of
>   the kernel?
>   - Ian Campbell is maintaining a DT bindings and .dts mirror tree which
>     should eventually become the 'master' for merging DT bindings.

It seems to me that the kernel tree has become the informal repository
for board dts files is in itself a problem.  It encourages people to
think the two are closely linked and that all that matters is that a
specific dts works with its corresponding kernel and vice versa,
rather than fdts being the general description they're supposed to be.

Not that I have much in the way of better ideas.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson
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