On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 2:05 PM Christian Ehrhardt  <
[email protected]> wrote:
<snip>

> I agree that we should promote the package as well.
>

Excellent!

<snip>

> @David:
> - the package appears to get regular updates/fixes by the foundations team
> - upstream releases ~quarterly
> - it might be too late for the brand new 2020.04~rc4, but what is the
> reason to not update to 19.10 or 20.01?
> - Debian has 20.01 in testing and 20.04 in testing, so their speed is fast
> - Is there an active maintenance and update policy in place or is it
> randomly updated as needed?
>

This also ties in to why we haven't (yet) updated to 19.10: at present,
most of the effort in Eoan and Focal regarding the Pi platform has been
around the boot sequence (and in particular, ensuring compatibility of the
hardware with it). Testing is at least partially manual (as the Pi 4 has
proved incompatible with the hardware used in the lab to provide SD images
automatically, leading to a labor-intensive process of flashing and
changing cards for testing). Until the testing process can be automated,
we're extremely reticent to change major components (due to the effort
involved in re-testing) unless there's some tangible benefit in the new
version.

I'm not aware of an official update policy for the package, but I do keep
track of the upstream releases and check the changelog on (non-rc-)
releases (though unfortunately upstream's attitude to changelogs is "our
changelog can be generated from our git log" ... which largely explains why
I don't bother with the rc- releases; it usually takes a full day to trawl
through the generated thing!)


> - sometimes packages tend to be outdated by accruing to much delta that is
> hard to rebase&maintain; It seems the packaging was split mid last year on
> 2019.04+dfsg-2ubuntu1 and not rebase d since then. Might I ask about how
> well upstreaming to Debian works (links to some examples would be nice).
> I'd wan't to avoid that this package seems to be "ok now" but we can expect
> it to rot away for the reasons that inhibit regular maintenance mentioned
> above.
>

The bulk of our (and indeed Debian's own) delta appears to be for specific
hardware support (e.g. pi4 in our case), or for customizing the
configuration of u-boot to a particular distro (our other pi patches, and
the nitrogen6x patch). The latter style of patches (configuration
customization) I wouldn't expect to migrate because they'll be specific to
Ubuntu (or to Debian as the case may be).

The Pi4 code patches we apply to 2019.07 (d/p/rpi4.patch) have already made
it upstream to the u-boot project (in 2019.10) so those should disappear on
the next rebase. The rest of the Pi patches (d/p/rpi-board-dt.patch and
d/p/rpi2-rpi3-config-tweaks.patch) have to do with customizing the default
configuration for Ubuntu (the second style of patches that I wouldn't
expect to migrate), as are the nitrogen patches. In other words, I don't
think there's any delta we currently carry that a) hasn't already made it
upstream or b) wouldn't be relevant to upstream.


> To be clear I don't request to do these updates for Focal (it is too
> late), but I'd want to see some reassurance that this is under control
> and e.g. will get a rebase soon once 20.10 opens.
>

We should do, if only to get the reduced delta from the merge of the pi4
patches upstream.


> Marking incomplete until this is clarified.
>
> Note:
> If the above is ok (I assume it will be) we can hand over to security
> since the old bug had no explicit security check as far as I can see and as
> you outlined other binary packages of the same source have known CVEs I'd
> want security to:
> a) review for u-boot-rpi
> b) state that it is ok to add this to main with known CVEs in other
> binaries of the package (not that this might e.g. break their CVE tracking)
>

Sounds good!

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Title:
  [MIR] u-boot-rpi

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