Dear Rob Herring,
In message CAL_JsqJTg4CVfk0o9hLd4ZVksj+DNEsKLjcv6T7-6F-=BR+J+Q@mail.gmail.com you wrote:
Why would you ever want to compile this into U-Boot at all? Then any changes you need to make mean compiling and installing a new U-Boot, which is something you normally don't want to do.
You may want to have factory default and "user" settings. Building in the factory settings would be one way to accomplish that.
No. Handling these independently, outside of the compiled U-Boot image is as easy, and much more flexible.
U-Boot is perfectly able to import such settings from text files (or text blobs stored somewhere, even attached to the U-Boot image, if you want), so just use the text files separately, instead of hard compiling them into the code.
In my case, I don't want to compile the environment into u-boot. But some people do as I copied my scripts from Tegra which has them built-in. Since built-in is C and standalone is text file, sharing is impossible. That is the main thing I'd like to see changed. Whether we support merging builtin and standalone envs is secondary.
Who says "impossible" here? When using a file system with write support, you can use "env export -t" to create a text representation and write it out to the file system (or store it in some reserved area on some storage device).
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk