On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 14:25:30 -0600 Grant Likely <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 12:47:18PM +1000, David Gibson wrote: > > Hi folks, > > > > Here's a patch I made for dtc a little while ago, and I'm not sure if > > it's something that sensibly ought to be merged into mainline dtc. > > > > The patch adds a '-s' option to dtc, which causes it to "sort" the > > tree before output. That is, it sorts the reserve entries, it sorts > > the properties within each node by name, and it sorts nodes by name > > within their parent. > > > > The main use for this is when looking at the differences between two > > device trees which are similar, except for semantically null internal > > rearrangements. Directly diffing the dts files will give a lot of > > noise due to the order changes, but running both trees through dtc -s > > then diffing will usually give a pretty sensible summary of the > > changes (it can still be confused by node name changes, of course). > > As discussed on IRC, I'm not thrilled with adding this as a > user-visible option because sorted trees aren't actually useful or > desirable (and in some cases undesireable) except for the use-case of > comparing trees. However, being able to compare unsorted trees is > still a use case that is very much needed, so I'm okay with this patch > until we come up with something better. > > Although maybe the -s option should remain undocumented; or at least > warn people away from using it. If it's undocumented, how would people find out how to compare device trees? Maybe just add a "(for comparing trees)" note in the help text to clarify the intended purpose? -Scott _______________________________________________ devicetree-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ozlabs.org/listinfo/devicetree-discuss
