In message 4852775C.1040401@harris.com you wrote:
When we manufacture a new board, we will load the flash via jtag. All I had planned to put in at that stage was the u-boot image itself. I did not plan to put in an initial environment, because the environment can easily be constructed by u-boot. The problem is that by the time the initial environment is constructed, some messages that I want to suppress will already have been printed, because "silent" is not defined yet. The purpose of the patch is to suppress messages in this case.
Why isn't "silent" defined as needed in your defualkt environment that gets used when there is no valid environment?
How do other people construct the initial environment, so that it can be loaded via jtag along with the u-boot executable?
The easiest way is set up everything as needed, or example by including the environment sector(s) with the U-Boot image (i. e. chosing a configuration which uses ENV_IS_EMBEDDED).
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk