Moving devices between categories with generic packages

Background

Generic device packages are awesome - they lessen the maintainance burden, reduce load on builders and get us closer to the "standard" Linux ways of booting. However, the current processes for moving devices to higher categories don't take generic device packages into account.

Problem

Generic device packages may support a large variety of the devices with the only requirement being kernel support for a device. The support however may vary greatly from device to device. Therefore, some devices may find themselves in e.g. main or community, while others are more on testing level of support. The generic device package however will likely reside in the highest category of any device it supports.

So far, so good. But what if one wants to promote a device supported by a generic device package to a higher category? Quoting the Wiki:

Request process

Make sure that the device fulfills all requirements for the new category (see table above). Create a new merge request in which you move the files. Add new maintainers to the device's APKBUILD and CODEOWNERS in the merge request, if necessary.

The problem is here: There is no merge request necessary to move the device from one category for another, and therefore no currently defined place for the one-week discussion period.

Possible solutions

I can imagine two solutions here:

1. Keep a list of currently supported devices and their categorization in a comment at the top of the generic device package's APKBUILD, this would mean a pmaports MR is required and a place for discussion would exist like it used to.

2. Open an issue on pmaports instead of a merge request for the discussion. If there are no objections within a week, the device can be promoted by editing its Wiki page.

Issues in pmaports might get less attention that MRs. So we should probably include in there some way so that the team (CC+TCs) get a bit more aware of it. But otherwise this makes sense. I will queue this for the meeting on 17/03/2025

added discussion label

added queued-for-meeting label

We talked about this in the team meeting. The proposal we came up with is that we could still create device directories in pmaports, but they just wouldn't contain an APKBUILD.

This would document the device support status, and we could keep the device support status config file there (if we follow through with moving device support status info from the wiki to pmaports).

The device dir could also contain a symlink to the generic device package APKBUILD (with a different filename ofc).

removed queued-for-meeting label