[U-Boot-Users] Proposal for patch to configure networkparameters

[Robert Schwebel]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 08:05:19AM +0200, Ulf Samuelsson wrote:
> Lets face it, everyone knows that the current way of configuring
> u-boot is horrible.

yup

> GPL does not mean that *you* need to be aware and approve each and
> every change.

Well, he is the maintainer. Like it or not, he *is*. Live with it or
fork and show that you can do it better.

> I just try to make the embedded Linux design flow more accessible to
> anyone that is interested. U-Boot is only a small part of that.

I don't understand why you need changes in u-boot in order to achieve
this. We use the same scenario for quite some time in PTXdist; ptxdist
has a view of "per project" vs. "per user" vs. "per board" properties,
so if you for example what to change something for the root filesystem,
you use

	ptxdist menuconfig

To change user specific options, e.g. proxy, use

	ptxdist setup

and, what you need here, is

	ptxdist boardsetup

which brings up a Kconfig dialog which lets you chose things like IP
address, netmask, nfsroot path, currently connected serial port etc. So
if you setup a board, simply do the changes in the user dialogs and run

	ptxdist test setenv

This starts an expect script [1] which automatically connects to your
u-boot console, cleans up whatever environment it finds there and
re-programs from a well defined project environment, consisting of
"project" dependend parts plus the information you entered in the step
above. The user doesn't have to cope with complex quoting rules , 0x vs
non-0x and all the inconveniences the u-boot interface has.

All that without any change to u-boot code.

> I hope You agree that you cannot control what people put in their 
> include/configs/<board>.h files.

Well, this is open source. I cannot imagine that Wolfgang will control
whatever you might want to do. You are perfectly free to do what you
want. That doesn't change the fact that he is the maintainer and he
decides what comes into his tree.

Robert 

[1] Yes, expect is tcl and uggly as hell. But there is nothing better
    available out there, at least not without major founding, and it
    somehow works.
-- 
 Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de
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