[PATCH] binman: Avoid requiring a home directory on startup

[Quentin Schulz]

Hi all,

On 2/17/23 03:55, Simon Glass wrote:
> Hi Tom,
> 
> On Thu, 16 Feb 2023 at 17:19, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 05:12:33PM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
>>> Hi Tom,
>>>
>>> On Tue, 14 Feb 2023 at 13:27, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 03:12:46PM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 3:08 PM Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Downloading things from the internet and putting them in to the default
>>>>>> PATH always and forever is also kinda not great?
>>>>>
>>>>> you just described a standard distribution.  this is like literally
>>>>> how all of them work.  not to mention every other language-specific
>>>>> distro tool out there (e.g. Python pip, Perl cpan, Go, etc...).
>>>>>
>>>>> maybe you'd like more guarantees on top (e.g. signature verification)
>>>>> which is reasonable.
>>>>>
>>>>> but to be clear, this script is already merged & in the tree, so your
>>>>> feedback doesn't block this patch.
>>>>
>>>> Yes, exactly. This is a fix on top of what we do today, so it should go
>>>> in. But modern distributions only install signed packages, and
>>>> language-specific tools tend to be a hive of bad examples. Looking over
>>>> binman right now, I see that we're either using apt (and oh, there's
>>>> "aot" typo in one spot) or downloading from a known Google drive, for
>>>> only a few less common tools.
>>>>
>>>> So yes, I would like to see some ideas on how to improve things in the
>>>> future so we aren't putting the binaries somewhere that's not a default
>>>> (or frequently common) PATH location.
>>>
>>> Are you thinking they should go in ~/.binman-tools or something like
>>> that? Then we would need to tell people to add it to their path. But
>>> we could make binman look there automatically.
>>
>> We should document that it's where we're putting stuff, not so much
>> "tell" them, unless you mean as a note when downloading.  But yes,
>> ~/.binman-tools sounds reasonable.  Maybe a flag to point elsewhere?
> 
> OK I will take a look.
> 

I think this should be directly put into the output/build directory used 
by U-Boot, because what happens when you have two U-Boot git repos with 
different version requirements for those host tools? Then you need to 
make sure you're not building both at the same time, that you update 
them properly before each build, etc.

We also have an issue with buildman creating (image) temporary files in 
the current git repo which makes people unhappy because they then get a 
dirty tree because we tend to forget to update the .gitignore. What 
about building out-of-tree by default like Buildroot does? e.g. with 
make O=$PWD/output/ ?

Cheers,
Quentin