In message 408D0DC6.1050602@intracom.gr you wrote:
We have a different definition of a "user" in mind it seems. Your users appear to be much more technical inclined than mine...
Every user is a user. User includes you and me. Butyes, we train our users to really emply the features of U-Boot, and many of them do. In some cases I was astonished myself to see what can be done by some tricky environment definitions in combination with other features in U-Boot.
Ideological purity is a worthy endeavor. The real world has different things in mind.
Maybe. But there is no reason that some perfectly valid real world requirements should be implemented in a way that breaks the design rules. I think this can be done in a clean way, too. And it is part of my role as maintainer to keep an eye on clean design and code.
optional extension, but I really don't see that much benefit. Already now it is pretty ifficult to find a variable definition in a long, multi-page "printenv" output.
Hmm, do I see a grep in the future? ;).
Probably not.
What Detlev Zundel and me have been discussing was the idea to create logical groups of environment variables, like network related (ipaddr, serverip, netmask, ethaddr, hostname, ...), boot arguments stuff, etc. We think that the capabilities of environment variables would be much easier to understand if variables that belong together logically are printed together, too. We put this discussion to a (temporary) rest when it became clear that we could not think of a clever way to implement such groups without breaking compatibility with the existing storage format of the environment.
Anyway, this discussion is pretty academic at the moment.
But very useful, I think.
We'll cross this bridge when we get there.
Agreed.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk