Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] Add capability to append to property

[David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>]

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On Tue, Dec 10, 2024 at 04:34:17PM +0100, Andreas Gnau wrote:
> On 2024-11-11 10:54, Ayush Singh wrote:
> > Allow appending values to a property instead of overriding the previous
> > values of property.
> > 
> > Currently, we have /delete-node/ and /delete-property/, but lack
> > /append-property/. Hence we end up having to repeat all existing values
> > when appending to a property (e.g. see [1] appending to clocks from
> > [2]).
> > 
> > This functionality is also important for creating a device tree based
> > implementation to support different types of addon-boards such as
> > mikroBUS, Grove [3], etc.
> > 
> > In practice, it looks as follows:
> > 
> > ```
> > dts-v1/;
> > 
> > / {
> > 	str-prop = "0";
> > };
> > 
> > / {
> > 	/append-property/ str-prop = "1";
> > };
> > ```
> 
> If we add /append-property/, why not add /prepend-property/ as well? This is
> not only "nice for consistency", but it would also enable solving a problem
> where SoC compatible strings from dtsi [1] need to be repeated in board dts
> [2], because one cannot prepend to an existing property.
> 
> ```
> dts-v1/;
> / {
> 	compatible = "soc-vendor,soc1234";
> };
> 
> / {
> 	/prepend-property/ compatible = "board-vendor,board-xyz";
> };
> ```
> 
> What do you think?

So, this kind of demonstrates why I don't love /append-property/ as a
proposed syntax.  The way I'd prefer to do this, ideally, is to allow
properties to be described as expressions.  We already have integer
expressions that can be used in < > context, but I had intended to
extent to string and bytestring expressions - but I've never had the
time to implement that.

Under that proposal, I'd expect appending to look something like:
	str-prop = /previous-value/, "1";

Prepending,
	str-prop = "1", /previous-value/;

.. and you could do both at once in the obvious way.

The downside, of course, is that this is a much more complicated
proposal to implement.  Parsing that syntax isn't too hard, but I
think doing it sensibly will need some structural changes in order to
evaluate property values as expressions, rather than simply
constructing the properties directly left to right.  In particular the
interactions between expression syntax and within-property labels (and
other markers) could be fiddly to get right.

-- 
David Gibson (he or they)	| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you, not the other way
				| around.
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson

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