[coreboot] CBFS fix?

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net
Sat Apr 25 00:37:43 CEST 2009


On 24.04.2009 23:41, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> On 24.04.2009 22:42 Uhr, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>   
>> On 24.04.2009 22:16, Myles Watson wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> Are we going to move the location of the master header?  I'd like to
>>> add an error to cbfstool when it overwrites code with its data.
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>> Why do I have the feeling that every mistake we made with LAR is
>> repeated with CBFS? One year from now CBFS and LAR will probably have
>> evolved to an identical feature set and the same design, have equally
>> complex code and it will be a nightmare to debug corner cases in each of
>> them.
>>   
>>     
>
> You keep praying this like a mantra. What's your point, Carl-Daniel?
>   

We'd have saved lots of developer time if LAR had been changed instead
of rewritten from scratch. I read through the original mails again and
there were maybe 2 or 3 points in LAR which people objected to. These
could have been fixed with a few dozen lines of diffs which would have
been reviewed easily. Instead, code was written from scratch. I don't
object to the name nor the general idea behind it. I just claim that the
rewrite was unnecessary and didn't benefit from the bug fixes which went
into LAR. Unless LAR developers were worse programmers than CBFS
developers, the bugs-per-LOC ratio is expected to be similar. Using LAR
development as a metric, this means there will be lots of corner cases
we have to fix in CBFS.

That's what scares me and reminds me of the days where patchbombs were
dropped on the tree, making throrough review effectively impossible due
to the size of the changeset.
(Fortunately, I wasn't active as developer back then, but trying to
track code history for some bugs made me feel the pain.)

Regards,
Carl-Daniel

-- 
http://www.hailfinger.org/





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