Dear Peter Tyser,
In message 1251059663.9041.21.camel@ptyser-laptop you wrote:
There was a fair amount of grey area as far as environment variable naming for those variables that used to refernce autoscr.
Why actually?
I guess because we don't see eye-to-eye:)
Indeed. We really should have a U-Boot developers meeting ...
I disagree here. "autoscript" has not much (if any) meaning when it comes to executing shell scripts (and this is what we are talking about there). I am not aware of a single man page in any of the many Unix flavours using this term. [OTOH, it is the name of an existing company and as such eventually a protected trade mark, at least in some parts of the world.]
I agree the term "autoscript" is non-standard, but what would be a better name for relating to a scipt that is automatically executed? The description of the current autoscript variable is:
It does not get _automatically_ executed. It get's executed when you run a special command, which reads and executes shell commands from a script rather than from stdin. The usual shells call this "sourcing a script file".
autoscript - if set to "yes" commands like "loadb", "loady", "bootp", "tftpb", "rarpboot" and "nfs" will attempt to automatically run script images (by internally calling "source").
This should be killed in this process, as it does nothing but duplicate the function of the "autostart" variable, just for another image type. It does not make sense to invent new names for the same function for all current and furture image types.
so if "autoscript" is set, a script is automatically ran. This name makes some sense to me and I couldn't think of a better one. Its name is also inline with the "autoload" and "autostart" variables. I think "autosource" is going to confuse a lot of people and is less descriptive than the current "autoscript".
"autoload" does something different. IMO, for automatic execution/ running/booting all image types should use "autostart".
Would you prefer to keep the functionality of the "autoscript" variable but with a different name, or remove that functionality altogether? Or are you referring to the references of "autoscript" in the board/matrix_vision/mvbc_p/mvbc_p_autoscript and board/matrix_vision/mvblm7/mvblm7_autoscript files?
We should merge this into "autostart".
A little off topic, but I'd personally love to get rid of the autoscript/autoscript_uname/autostart/autoload variables and have people explicitly use the commands they need. For example, the dhcp command would only set some environment variable values, then tftp/nfs would have to be called, followed by the appropriate boot command. Right now, the dhcp command behave in a number of different ways depending on the values of the auto* variables mentioned above. Same with tftp, loadb, etc.
I see, and I tend to agree. But then, we should also rename the commands, i. e. "dhcpboot" -> "dhcp", "tftpboot" -> "tftp", etc. Maybe this should be done in a two-step procedure, too: first introduce the new commands (which already changes default behaviour if you just type for example "tftp"), then deprecate and (after a sufficient transition period) remove the old commands.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk