Hello.
Very nice feature was introduced in commit:
86b9c3e4e48ba47ef28781d06b97846aca74bc8e| env: Allow U-Boot scripts to be placed in a .env file
This feature works as extension for old CFG_EXTRA_ENV_SETTINGS and make me confused why it doesn't work for configured default env file.
Now in U-Boot config we have two features related to external environment file:
1st feature (introduced by mentioned commit):
CONFIG_ENV_SOURCE_FILE "Environment file to use"
2nd feature
CONFIG_USE_DEFAULT_ENV_FILE "Create default environment from file"
CONFIG_DEFAULT_ENV_FILE "Path to default environment file"
In 1st feature only basename of .env file can be specified. So env file can be located only in board dir which is a limitation for this nice feature:
"The file must be in the board directory and have a .env extension, so the resulting filename is typically board/<vendor>/<board>/<CONFIG_ENV_SOURCE_FILE>.env"
In 2nd feature I can specify default env file as full path so it can be located everywhere - even outside U-Boot source - which is very nice when U-Boot is built by Buildroot. I can easily set path as system environment variable and it works:
CONFIG_USE_DEFAULT_ENV_FILE=y CONFIG_DEFAULT_ENV_FILE="$(BR2_EXTERNAL_FOO_PATH)/board/foo/u-boot.env"
Unfortunately I cannot do the same for 1st feature without patching U-Boot sources to put my custom env file into board dir.
I can see two way of improving features: 1st: to extend 1st feature with ability to specify full patch to env file, or 2nd one: run the same parsing mechanism also for 2nd feature (default env file).
BR,
Wojcech