Obsolete mvme5500 in favor of Beatnik

[Joel Sherrill]

This is a rare case where we have two BSPs which support the same hardware. The beatnik primarily targets the mvme6100 but per the README also supports the mvme5500. The mvme5500 only supports the mvme5500. These are supposed to be BSPs in use by the EPICS community and consolidation will ease the transition to libbsd a bit.

We need to determine if there are any technical features in the mvme5500 BSP not in the beatnik. Or any other barriers.

It should be simple enough to add mvme5500 as a variant of beatnik so no user would need to know we removed it.

Ultimately though, we need a user who can test on the hardware and attest we can do this.

[Chris Johns]

I suggest we use the new build system to do this. What changing the mvme5500 to inherit from the beatnik?

Can we tag a BSP as depreciated with some warning text? It would be helpful in this case.

[Joel Sherrill]

Sure but the first step is whether this particular case can even happen?

But we don't have a mechanism to tag a bsp like that and historically just announced and a while later, removed it.

[Joel Sherrill]

Assigning to Gedare since he interacts the most with the EPICS community and should be able to determine when the beatnik meets the technical requirements to delete the mvme5500 BSP itself.

Then we should consider a separate BSP alias for mvme5500 and mvme6100.