Hello Eddy,
On Tue, 5 Jan 2016 22:55:40 -0500
Eddy Beaupré <[email protected]> wrote:
> A few weeks ago, i kinda got angry at the command line parser of
> sunxi-nand-part and its inability to figure out on what kind of device
> it is running. What started as a simple hack to at least make it figure
> out the current partition scheme of the device became a complete rewrite.
>
> My version can create, delete, and insert partitions, it can create a
> brand new MBR on the device, it can work on image file directly. It can
> do silly things like creating a SUN4I partition on a SUN7I device. It
> can backup or restore MBR, and it can figure out the current type of
> partition.
Thanks for announcing your work on the mailing list. Just as I
said in the github pull request, any useful improvements to the
'sunxi-nand-part' are welcome:
https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-tools/pull/36#issuecomment-167857022
I understand that you feel that the current 'sunxi-nand-part' is not
perfect and deserves a "complete rewrite". I don't know if there are
many users of the current version of the 'sunxi-nand-part' tool, but
we have it packaged in the Linux distributions. And we want to ensure
a smooth and painless upgrade for them.
Basically, if you want this tool to be used by the other people, a
usable howto documentation would really help a lot. The easiest and
least time consuming way to draft such documentation is to use the
wiki. But any other forms of documentation are also welcome.
For example, the USB boot feature is documented at:
https://linux-sunxi.org/FEL/USBBoot
But NAND support still seems to be in a relatively bad shape (both
the code and the documentation). Now you may have implemented a
perfect tool, but many people will not be able to use it until
they get a decent howto guide.
Going forward, sunxi-tools will probably eventually gain the ability to
backup/restore NAND (with some help from U-Boot) and also parse the
raw Allwinner's NAND images to extract FEX files.
> Since that went well, i told myself, that i could probably make the
> build process a little bit more user friendly, So i rewrote it to work
> with autoconf/automake (forgetting that i already did that about 3 years
> ago and it was already in another branch of the official sunxi-tools).
> But did it more wisely this time.
>
> Each tool is built by its own set of tools. The main builder just try to
> figure out what tools can be build and chain them, It can cross-compile
> almost everything (the only tool that can't be cross-compiled is
> sunxi-fel, because of its dependency with libusb). It will avoid doing
> silly things (like build an x86 version of sunxi-pio).
>
> The main drawback of the new modular build system is its speed. It take
> a whooping 2m7s on a Cubetruck to configure and build everything (tools
> and bare metal tools).
We basically follow what the distribution maintainers want (Debian,
Fedora, Buildroot). There was a discussion on the mailing list some
time ago and the consensus was that autotools is not a panacea and
the current makefile based build system is good enough.
Either way, this is completely orthogonal to the 'sunxi-nand-part'
tool improvements. And if you are piling too many unrelated changes
in one patch set, then reviewing it becomes unnecessarily difficult.
> Another thing that bugged me was the lack of man pages, so i wrote a
> bunch of man pages to document a bit each tools.
That's a good point. The sunxi-tools package needs man pages. Patches
are surely welcome.
> To continue on what has been done, i added a sunxi- prefix to all the
> tools that didn't had one. Even fex2bin and bin2fex are now prefixed
> with sunxi- (sunxi-fexc now just check if bin2fex or fex2bin appear in
> its executable name to select its mode, no longer an exact match).
>
> Since theses changes ended up with something very different than the
> current tools, and after a little chat with Siarhei Siamashka, i think
> the best thing to do is just keep all this as a fork of sunxi-tools and
> not submit many many many patches and try to have this merge with the
> official sunxi-tools.
>
> Everything is available on my fork if you want to play with it:
>
> https://github.com/armStrapTools/sunxi-tools
Thanks!
If your 'sunxi-nand-part' improvements are useful and people figure out
how to use them, then these improvements will eventually find their way
into https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-tools too.
Again, as I mentioned in the github pull request, links to your git
repository in the relevant sections of the linux-sunxi wiki will make
your work easier to find and test.
I personally have nothing against forks. Moreover, that's a great
feature of git and provides a complete freedom of experimentation.
--
Best regards,
Siarhei Siamashka
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