Dear Tom,
In message 20211109194224.GB24579@bill-the-cat you wrote:
The only reason I want to introduce this is because I want to have my imx8mq board built by CI. This board needs an external HDMI firmware which is used by mkimage. But because this firmware is not available in the CI build, it comes to the abort. With other boards it is also so that in the CI external blobs are not available and these make nevertheless without error a binman run. In this case only a warning is output.
...
Unfortunately in these days of needing multiple inputs to create a functional image and also needing to have CI be able to be at all useful, what we do in many many many cases is yell loudly to the user that the resulting file here will NOT work and why. So yes, some "yell it won't work but not return non-zero exit status" is the norm.
This is a terrible degradtion from standard programming style, then.
I would be very much open however to some way to handle this differently. Some environment variable our tools check for and then yell-but-succeed? Some other idea? I'm just thinking out loud here.
Well, why not fix the root cause?
Heiko writes that "an external HDMI firmware" is needed - so the fix is to provide one, or at least a dummy file which is good enough for the build to succeed. It should be trivial to create a dummy file in the CI context, no?
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk