Hi Stephen,
On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 10:00:27AM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
On 05/18/2018 08:44 AM, Quentin Schulz wrote:
While the `env export` can take as parameters variables to be exported, `env import` does not have such a mechanism of variable selection.
Let's add a `-w` option that asks `env import` to look for the `whitelisted_vars` env variable for a space-separated list of variables that are whitelisted.
Would it be better for the -w option to accept a variable name rather than hard-coding it as whitelisted_vars? That way, people could import/export different sets of variables at different times, and also could choose a more use-case-specific variable name than whitelisted_vars in order to describe why those variables are "whitelisted".
This has been raised in the previous version of the patch[1] (of which you weren't in the mail recipients) and a similar patch[2] made by Alex Kiernan (Cc of this patch series). I'd say it's an ongoing discussion, though I should have mentioned it in the comments of the patch?
TL;DR: Proposition 1: Have -w only which "hardcodedly" checks for "whitelisting_vars", +: straightforward implementation of the argument parsing, -: implicit declaration of the list: you have to know to set whitelisted_vars in the environnement,
Proposition 2: Have -w followed by one string-word which is the name of the env variable where to look for the list of whitelisted env variables, +: explicit var to check where whitelist is looked for, -: a bit of complexity added to the parsing of the parameters of the env import function,
Proposition 3: Have -w followed by the list of whitelisted env variable, +: explicit list -: the list cannot be separated by comma (valid character for an env variable) or a space (would not be able to distinguish the last arguments of the commands which are address and size with size being optional => how to know if size was passed or not?), what char can be used to separate env variables in the list? how does it perform with a very long list of whitelisted variables?
I don't know how many features and their complexity we can add to the env import/export functions, but keeping their arguments simple is a way to keep features hopefully easy to implement in the future.
I'm not convinced by any of the propositions but proposition 1 is the one I implemented for now. I just want a consensus towards a solution (be it among the given 3 or another one) and I'm good with it.
Thanks, Quentin
[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/u-boot@lists.denx.de/msg286266.html [2] http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/891422/