Thanks, Anastasia. DeveloperBox is the second programmer to be removed.
As far as I can tell, this programmer sold around ten units worldwide and uses a custom bitbang implementation as an 'internal' recovery programmer for unbricking devices. I dont know the exact details because there is very little public information about it. My reasoning is that, without an active maintainer or hardware available for testing, we set the precedent that flashrom will accept any programmer into the tree indefinitely. That makes it too easy for someone to design a niche programmer, sell a handful of units to friends or family, submit support, disappear, and leave us maintaining yet another untestable backend. As I mentioned in the diff, we need more contributors and more testers. The ever-growing list of programmers can give potential contributors the impression that maintainers are expected to understand, own, and test every programmer in the tree. That is intimidating, especially if they come from a web/software background where you are expected to test with all the databases/protocol supported that touch that path. --- Abdelkader - Full Stack Janitor On Wed, 1 Jul 2026, at 09:51, Anastasia Klimchuk wrote: > Hello everyone, > > We are dropping the programmer rayer_spi, because it can only work on > old machines, which can only ship old flashrom versions. > See more details here https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/93706 > > With this, rayer_spi stays available in flashrom versions up to 1.7.0 > (but not later than that), which should cover the cases of old > machines with old environments. > > Thanks heaps to Abdelkader who did all the research and the patch. > > The patch is not submitted yet, in case someone has last minute suggestions. > But importantly, if you have a suggestion to keep the programmer, it > should come together with: the commitment to subscribe as its > maintainer, and modernise it. (If this is even possible). > > We might identify more programmers in the same situation, in such > cases there will be a separate post for each. > > -- > Anastasia. > _______________________________________________ > flashrom mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] >
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