Re: [U-Boot] [PATCH] fdt: Enhance dts/Makefile to be all things to all men

Dear Stephen Warren,

In message [off-list ref] you wrote:

quoted

Sorry, instead we should strive to be compatible to a reasonably old,
stable version of DTC, like we do for all other tools as well.  As
mentioned before - just because RHEL 5 ships an ancient version of -
say - "make" we will NOT start building this from the sources ourself.
This cannot be the way to go.

So the result of that is that we can never ever use new features in any
tool, at least in any meaningful time-frame.

I wrote "we should strive", not "this is the only way".

However, when enabling a new feature, such as using device trees to
configure U-Boot[1], for which tool support is new and evolving along
with the feature itself, and which is only used on a very very few
boards and even fewer SoCs right now within U-Boot, it seems entirely
reasonable to demand that the people working on/with that new feature
are aware that it's evolving, and that they may need to take a few extra
steps to go out and get tools that support that new feature. No doubt
once this feature has settled down a bit, and distros have pulled in
newer versions of dtc, everthing will "just work" just like any other
stable feature.

Agreed.  And nothing prevents you to installl on your system another,
more recent version of dtc or any other tools needed for specific
purposes.

If you don't accept this, then we simply have to ban any include use in
U-Boot; dtc -i isn't in distro-packaged versions of dtc, so we'd need to

This has never been my intention. I object only against including the
dtc source into U-Boot, and against automatic methods to build dtc as
part of U-Boot, even in a way that depends on the U-Boot version.

dtc is a tool, like gcc or others.  We may test against specific
versions of the tools in the Makefiles, and even abort a build if an
incompatible version is found.  But we will not include tool sources,
nor build / install rules for tools.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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