On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 11:36:13AM -0500, Rob Herring wrote:

On 07/26/2013 10:49 AM, Olof Johansson wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 7:10 AM, Mark Brown [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 03:09:29PM +0200, Richard Cochran wrote:

quoted

Unless I totally misunderstood, the thread is talking about letting
established bindings change with each new kernel version.  I am
opposed to that.

No, nobody is really saying that is a particularly good idea.  There is
some debate about how we work out what an established binding is but
there's no serious suggestion that we don't want stable bindings.

Yes, what Mark said -- _today_ all bindings are subject to change and
can be changed in lockstep with the kernel. This has been necessary as
part of development to sort out all of the various bootstrapping
issues across platforms.

This statement is an incredible piece of doublespeak. "Of course we
want stable bindings. That is why 'all bindings are subject to change
and can be changed in lockstep with the kernel.'"

If you want to get away from the DT churn, then you have got to tell
people in no uncertain terms that bindings in a released kernel are a
stable ABI and must be supported into the future.

If you need a playground for new ideas, refactoring platforms, etc,
then go right ahead and create one, but please don't do this with
released kernels.

This is absolutely not true on a global basis. Any binding used on
powerpc or sparc is not subject to change. Furthermore, there are ARM
platforms such as highbank where the bindings are expected to be stable.
That's not saying they don't change (new properties for SATA just
today), but they only change in a backwards compatible way.

Right, and lets hope the arm tree can also take this stand.

Thanks,
Richard