[PATCH] buildman: Add a way to build a particular target

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 at 16:54, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 04:42:30PM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
> > Hi Tom,
> >
> > On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 at 12:53, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 12:45:29PM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
> > > > Hi Tom,
> > > >
> > > > On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 at 07:20, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > On Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 06:26:16AM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > At present buildman only supports building the default target. Generally
> > > > > > this is what is wanted, but in some cases boards erroneously have a
> > > > > > different target for product extra files.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Add a --target option to help. Also add a comment indicating which
> > > > > > letters are free for new options.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Signed-off-by: Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
> > > > >
> > > > > How do you use this? It would be nice to be able to do "--target
> > > > > u-boot-initial-env" for example for converting and verifying the
> > > > > conversion of boards to plain text environment. Except the list of
> > > > > artifacts that are kept isn't updated with that string as well. And
> > > > > FWIW, is this for a case not solved by CONFIG_BUILD_TARGET?
> > > >
> > > > It's related to the problem where colibri-imx8 doesn't actually build
> > > > an image with the default boot target.
> > >
> > > I don't recall if there's a good reason for imx8 not setting
> > > CONFIG_BUILD_TARGET to something, but that sounds like how to solve this
> > > problem. "make all" should work, normally.
> >
> > Even if it did, the build fails the first time. It just needs to be fixed/
>
> Yes, there's both the problem of CONFIG_BUILD_TARGET not being set and
> then whatever issues there are with configuring access to the blobs
> especially when they exist and aren't faked via BINMAN_ALLOW_MISSING.
> IIRC Toradex does weekly builds of top of tree, via OpenEmbedded / Yocto
> so there's not some bitrot here to be fixed, just smoothing out
> integration.

To me, BUILD_TARGET is a pre-Binman construction and we should just
use binman to make sure that the default target builds a bootable
image.

It's good to hear that Toradex has CI going, but it looks like there
is a workaround in there.

>
> > > > But yes, we could add more things to buildman, e.g. it could output
> > > > the initial env as a file for later parsing.
> > >
> > > Well, your patch supports that, if I read it right. It just doesn't save it.
> >
> > Yes, it would be pretty easy to provide a flag that builds that
> > target, runs the executable and puts the environment in a file.
>
> Er, "make u-boot-initial-env" does that. So "--target
> u-boot-initial-env" should suffice, if that was also saved.

Oh, yes. Either I didn't know that or I forgot...

Regards,
Simon