Re: [PATCH][fsl-community-bsp-base] setup-environment: provide a MACHINE menu

[Trevor Woerner <trevor.woerner@linaro.org>]

On 03/27/14 14:08, Daiane.Angolini@freescale.com wrote:
>> Traditionally I've been hesitant to send patches, but I've decided to not
>> be as shy anymore. Therefore I don't expect everything I send to be
>> successful :-)
> Yes, please, don't be shy anymore and send all patches you have ;-)

The can of worms is now open :-)

> I like your patch. But it have several important problems.
>
> 1) assign a number to a board may lead user to error. I love the machine list, and I love that imx53qsb is 20, but when a new board is added I will try to use 20 and it will not be imx53qsb. This is only one example, and this only happens if you use a dynamic order for the machine list.

I hadn't thought of that, but I agree completely.

> 2) it only list machines from meta-fsl-arm and meta-fsl-arm-extra. I tried 
>
> MACHINE="qemuarm" source setup-environment build
>
> And I faced a big error message!

Whoops! I hadn't tested the emulators, but I agree they should certainly
be in the list too. Getting a big error message isn't what I wanted to
have happen.

> I´m not sure if we want to list external boards, but it looks weird to me not being able to have a qemu build dir.

By "external boards" I assume you mean non-ARM or non-freescale boards
(e.g. beagle)? If so, I don't think we should worry too much about
listing external boards, setup-environment comes from a
freescale-specific repository. If someone is following the steps to
checkout and build for a freescale board (and therefore using
setup-environment), I think it's a safe enough assumption they're going
to want to build for one of the boards supported by the freescale BSP
repositories (or qemu). I don't think it's too much to say that someone
would be in the wrong place if they were complaining that the freescale
setup script didn't include options to build for a MIPS64 target :-)

In other words, I believe the setup-environment script provided in
fsl-community-bsp-base is already freescale-specific. Making it more so
shouldn't be a problem?

> 3) In error message, instead of list all boards one before the other, list one machine per line.

Okay.

> I like to prompt user instead of assuming a default machine. But a list of machines is not good when you have 150 machines. And I start to try to group the machines in SOC family, or in meta-fsl-arm/meta-fsl-arm-extra, or any other criteria to help user to decide it.

Actually, an early version of my script did that, but I thought it was
too "text-y" so I shortened it to just the machine name. I figure the
person has the board sitting there, they know the board name, so finding
that name in a list that is sorted alphabetically shouldn't be too hard :-D

But in this decision you can also see my bias. I don't look at the
boards as being either from freescale or not, so sorting them that way
is not something I would do by default :-)