[U-Boot] [PATCH] fdt: Enhance dts/Makefile to be all things to all men

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Stephen Warren,

In message <51A68A4C.4060505 at wwwdotorg.org> you wrote:
>
> > Sorry, instead we should strive to be compatible to a reasonably old,
> > stable version of DTC, like we do for all other tools as well.  As
> > mentioned before - just because RHEL 5 ships an ancient version of -
> > say - "make" we will NOT start building this from the sources ourself.
> > This cannot be the way to go.
> 
> So the result of that is that we can never ever use new features in any
> tool, at least in any meaningful time-frame.

I wrote "we should strive", not "this is the only way".

> However, when enabling a new feature, such as using device trees to
> configure U-Boot[1], for which tool support is new and evolving along
> with the feature itself, and which is only used on a very very few
> boards and even fewer SoCs right now within U-Boot, it seems entirely
> reasonable to demand that the people working on/with that new feature
> are aware that it's evolving, and that they may need to take a few extra
> steps to go out and get tools that support that new feature. No doubt
> once this feature has settled down a bit, and distros have pulled in
> newer versions of dtc, everthing will "just work" just like any other
> stable feature.

Agreed.  And nothing prevents you to installl on your system another,
more recent version of dtc or any other tools needed for specific
purposes.

> If you don't accept this, then we simply have to ban any include use in
> U-Boot; dtc -i isn't in distro-packaged versions of dtc, so we'd need to

This has never been my intention. I object only against including the
dtc source into U-Boot, and against automatic methods to build dtc as
part of U-Boot, even in a way that depends on the U-Boot version.

dtc is a tool, like gcc or others.  We may test against specific
versions of the tools in the Makefiles, and even abort a build if an
incompatible version is found.  But we will not include tool sources,
nor build / install rules for tools.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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