Re: A couple of suggestions

[Allen Briggs <briggs%wasabisystems.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 11:06:21AM -0800, Derek God3 wrote:
> because my port/board is a completley differnet
> machine than say a "walnut". It boots differently, installs differently
> has support for different MBR, partitions and bootlabels, a different
> set of "standard" devices, in fact, the only thing in common is the cpu :-)

Well, that really kind of raises two questions:

        * What defines a seperate port, and

        * How far should the evbXXX ports go (as opposed to more specific
          and directed ports) to support different board configurations,
          booting requirements, etc.

The latter is a question in part because each board might have,
say, two or three different options for ROMs, even, and each might
have different requirements.  The evbXXX seems to aim at a general
(or generic) level that is a kind of superset of functionality
(this is actually similar to the nature of most hardware evaluation
boards, which is of course where the evb prefix comes from).

I'm not sure that this is the best way to arrange things, though.
My main concern with propagating __${BOARDTYPE}__ or similar is
that it will add another level of complexity to an already fairly-
complicated system, and that way lies a certain amount of potential
fragility.  I think it may also encourage people to specialize in
some cases when it might be better for the project to generalize.

-allen

-- 
 Allen Briggs                     briggs%wasabisystems.com@localhost
 Wasabi Systems, Inc.             http://www.wasabisystems.com/