On Monday, 12 May 2025 15:09:52 CEST Marcus Hähnel wrote:
On Mon, 2025-05-05 at 11:25 +0000, Richard Clark wrote:
But that brings me to a bigger question. How do I fetch only Long-Term-Support or Fully-Tested-and-Blessed versions? Github is woefully lacking in proper version support. I can't send random untested code to my customers.
All code we push to Github went through our internal QA process, running compile checks for all our supported architectures as well as an extensive test suite on different platforms and configurations. So from that point of view I would say you can consider all code pushed to Github as “Fully-Tested-and-Blessed”.
I don't have a strong opinion about quality assurance for people wanting to provide solutions for paying customers, but I have personally wondered how I might successfully and conveniently reproduce repository configurations when creating new L4Re development environments.
For example, if I decide to work on support for a new board, I might want to replicate the L4Re configuration I have been using for another board. Starting from scratch, it was possible to use the ham tool, but despite it apparently maintaining version details for the different repositories, it wasn't particularly clear how one might preserve or export that metadata for further use.
I now see that there is another tool involved:
https://l4re.org/getting_started/bob.html
Although that doesn't seem to replace the ham tool:
https://l4re.org/getting_started/make.html
Naturally, one might say that this is the point at which anyone serious-enough about using L4Re would get in touch with Kernkonzept and start talking business, but such a lack of clarity tends to suggest that either there aren't particularly adequate solutions for such fundamental needs or that any adequate solutions that may exist aren't for people merely investigating or evaluating the technology.
Again, it isn't my concern if there's a business decision involved that everybody feels comfortable with, and if there's a steady stream of interested customers that seems to justify such a decision, but I could easily see potential users going elsewhere if the answer to simple questions is "talk to us". Even in reasonably large organisations, hitting an approval barrier that "talk to us" or "register your interest" represents can be a strong disincentive, especially if other solutions exist.
I accept that my opinion isn't important, however, since my own activities are confined to my own interests and driven by a general belief that L4Re represents a reasonable foundation for certain kinds of systems. That there isn't exactly much of a public community around L4Re could also be regarded as a disincentive for potential adopters, which is unfortunate.
Paul