[PATCH 00/31] Allow building sandbox with MSYS2

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Tue, 25 Apr 2023 at 10:04, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 04:59:53AM +0200, Heinrich Schuchardt wrote:
> >
> >
> > Am 25. April 2023 01:08:05 MESZ schrieb Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>:
> > >This expands the existing work to allow sandbox to build and run on
> > >Windows using MSYS2.
> >
> > Why do we need this?
> > Wouldn't a developer on Windows be much better served using WSL (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install)?
>
> Depending on corporate rules that may or may not be allowed. But I too
> am interested in the use case driving these changes. Sandbox is
> essentially a test platform. We test that we can do host tools on
> Windows via MSYS2 for semi-reasonable reasons, since those tools can be
> used in a number of places. We do the same on macOS in Azure as a check
> on building regular targets there too (which should work and I believe
> people do, both from macOS and from *BSD which this is a stand-in for,
> as we can't get free VMs for them today). What's the end goal of this
> series?

It is really just an extension of the existing tools-only build. I am
not sure it is strongly motivated, but the end goal is to be able to
do small features / development on U-Boot on Windows, since some users
seem to only use a 'pure' Windows environment and don't use WSL, which
after all is for cross-compiling. For example, it is possible to build
a FIT and check it using the tools, but it is not possible (without
this series) to see whether U-Boot will load it and behave correctly.

The binman changes are to make that work on Windows (pip install
binary-manager) which is important for that tool.

The 'weak' issue is something that I am hoping can be resolved (in
fact Bin made a promising comment on that patch).

This has all come up as we try to establish a standard 'payload'
format which can be used across the industry. For better or worse,
some people do use Windows for development.

Regards,
Simon