[RFC 0/2] Do not stop with an error when mkimage fails

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Tom,

In message <20211109194224.GB24579 at bill-the-cat> you wrote:
> 
> > The only reason I want to introduce this is because I want to have my
> > imx8mq board built by CI. This board needs an external HDMI firmware
> > which is used by mkimage. But because this firmware is not available
> > in the CI build, it comes to the abort. With other boards it is also
> > so that in the CI external blobs are not available and these make
> > nevertheless without error a binman run. In this case only a warning
> > is output.
...
> Unfortunately in these days of needing multiple inputs to create a
> functional image and also needing to have CI be able to be at all
> useful, what we do in many many many cases is yell loudly to the user
> that the resulting file here will NOT work and why.  So yes, some "yell
> it won't work but not return non-zero exit status" is the norm.

This is a terrible degradtion from standard programming style, then.

> I would be very much open however to some way to handle this
> differently.  Some environment variable our tools check for and then
> yell-but-succeed?  Some other idea?  I'm just thinking out loud here.

Well, why not fix the root cause?

Heiko writes that "an external HDMI firmware" is needed - so the fix
is to provide one, or at least a dummy file which is good enough for
the build to succeed.  It should be trivial to create a dummy file
in the CI context, no?

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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