On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Scott Wood scottwood@freescale.com wrote:
Ben Warren wrote:
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Scott Wood scottwood@freescale.com wrote:
I find a device tree much easier to figure out than a tangled mess of header files, #defines, and #ifdefs...
In many ways, yes. But are you an average Joe or a Linux kernel propellerhead?
Is u-boot work normally done by average Joes, and does the average Joe really find the preprocessor mess more intuitive than a "propellerhead"?
You know what I mean. Some people like yourself do this for a living, and are involved day-to-day in its specification. Of course it's intuitive to you. For most people, getting U-boot going is one stage in the development process of software for an embedded device. They work on it for a few weeks or months, then on something completely different. A few months or years later, they come back to it.
While we're at it, let's re-write u-boot in Visual Basic. :-)
Uh, yeah. I like the idea of a central repo for hardware info, and the device tree concept is good. My point is that the syntax, while concise and exact, can be intimidating. Just look at the amount of traffic on the mailing lists of people that don't understand what all the fields mean when specifying IRQs etc. Anything we can do to make it less so for noobies is a good thing for everybody.
cheers, Ben