[U-Boot] [PATCH] Kbuild: allow building tools without board configuration

[Alexey Brodkin]

Hi Tom,

On Mon, 2014-03-31 at 11:16 -0400, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 05:33:51PM +0900, Masahiro Yamada wrote:
> 
> > Prior to Kbuild, U-Boot could build under tools/ directory
> > withour configuring for a specific board.
> > 
> > That feature was lost when switching to Kbuild.
> > 
> > This patch revives it again by adding a make target "tools-only".
> > 
> > Usage:
> >   $ make tools-only
> > 
> > Neither board configuration nor cross compiler are required to
> > build host tools.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <yamada.m at jp.panasonic.com>
> > Suggested-by: Alexey Brodkin <Alexey.Brodkin at synopsys.com>
> > Cc: Alexey Brodkin <Alexey.Brodkin at synopsys.com>
> > Cc: Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
> > Cc: Tom Rini <trini at ti.com>
> 
> Problem is that we make enabling the signature code (which adds more
> deps on the host) based on the config, and this was intentional.   So
> I'm not sure if we want to do this exactly, at least right now.

Could you please add a bit more clarifications for your comment.

I don't quite understand why do I need to have any info from a board
configuration when building "mkimage" utility.

Maybe I'm missing something.

And the problem is without proposed patch it's virtually impossible (or
I don't know how) to build "mkimage" without configuring the real board.

For example what Linux distros will do to build generic "mkimage" tool?

And I think it is very important to resolve before U-Boot v2014.04 gets
released.

-Alexey