xPL terminology

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 01:24:59PM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
> Hi Tom,
> 
> On Tue, 27 Aug 2024 at 10:50, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, Aug 25, 2024 at 07:07:23AM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > We have the term 'SPL', which has a dual meaning. It is both a
> > > particular phase of U-Boot (the one that loads U-Boot proper) and a
> > > generic name for any pre-proper phase.
> > >
> > > You can see that in a few areas, but for example CONFIG_SPL_BUILD is
> > > enabled for TPL and VPL builds, not just SPL.
> > >
> > > I propose to rename the generic term from SPL to xPL (meaning any PL
> > > phase), leaving SPL to just refer to the phase before U-Boot proper.
> > >
> > > The symbol would be CONFIG_XPL but in documentation we would talk of
> > > xPL, with a lower-case X, so it is more obvious that it refers to any
> > > phase.
> > >
> > > What do you think?
> >
> > I still worry this is just another part of the long symptom of needing
> > to re-work how we configure / build as we have 1 case of "build things
> > this way" (full U-Boot) and N cases of "build things another way" (SPL,
> > TPL, VPL, UPL?). And really we need a way to short-hand
> > "fooboard_defconfig" means "fooboard_spl_defconfig +
> > fooboard_tpl_defconfig + fooboard_SOMETHING_defconfig".
> 
> IMO my XPL series does this, at least for some definition of this. I'd
> really like to get that in as it would make all of this much easier.

Yeah, what I recall of your XPL series was that it made a lot of changes
I didn't like and highlighted what I thought was that yes, really
Yamada-san was right all along and we need a different way of
configuring + building. I had even today thought that we could possibly
get away with some shorthand where if for "fooboard_defconfig" we _also_
had "fooboard_spl_defconfig" we knew to build in ${O}/spl/ the spl
variant. It would be harder for cases where we have "fooboard_defconfig"
and "fooboard_hs_defconfig" that both need "fooboard_spl_defconfig", but
it would cover many cases at least. Anyhow...

I think a series that replaces CONFIG_SPL_BUILD with CONFIG_XPL_BUILD
(and the required logic to make that work...) would be fine.

> > But on the flip side, I also suppose replacing CONFIG_SPL_BUILD with
> > CONFIG_XPL_BUILD would be less confusing.
> 
> Yes. What do you think of E's idea of renaming all the options? I
> quite liked it when I read it, but now I am thinking that having
> everything be xPL is quite a nice convention. If we have SETUP_... and
> TINY_... it is less clear that they are related.

Yes, I think we need better descriptive documentation for what we have
and then only maybe renaming a few things that might be too cryptic.

-- 
Tom
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