Looks like I'm too late to the party here, but I just read this and wanted to also come out in support of what Nico said. I think the endless copy&pasting that seems to have happened 5-10 years ago in coreboot left us with pretty awful maintainability consequences and we should (and I think we mostly are?) definitely move away from that. It's not just about correctness, it's also a huge obstacle for anyone trying to refactor some common interface that is used by hundreds of almost-identical board or chipset versions and actively hindering us from developing common code forward. Maybe it served a purpose at the time when the project was smaller and there were less people with time to review, but these days we are a pretty mature project with a lot of industry support (i.e. new boards and chipsets mostly get added by salaried vendor engineers rather than reverse-engineering hobbyists) and should be able to afford higher code quality and reuseability standards.
I think most of this is changing and has changed already (like Patrick said it happened gradually) -- these days most chipset code for both x86 and Arm is in src/soc/vendor/common, and most new mainboards use the variant system. Whenever I see a patch of someone copy&pasting a lot of code I definitely ask them to find a way to factor it out and make it common instead. But if there is still uncertainty about what the general right approach for new code is, I think we should decide (and maybe write it down somewhere) that it should be code reuse and not copy&paste. _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
