Dear Tom, In message <20210706154346.GT9516@bill-the-cat> you wrote: > > I'm pretty confident that exactly zero people have written complex > U-Boot scripts and then been happy about the experience.
I have seen many U-Boot scripts which were pretty complex, but working absolutely reliably. > TCL has its fans. csh has it's fans. The question isn't what's the > best desktop shell or general scripting language, but what's the most > useful in our environment an use cases. Maybe you should try and do a poll of our user base which CLI they _want_? I doubt there will be any significant percentage voting for Tcl. I know of a large number of systems which offer a shell interface on their command line, and those who don't usually use completely proprietary code. I know of very few examples where Tcl is being used. > I don't know if it's right either. But drawing on my comment just now > and above about complex boot scripts, I also don't know if "it's sh but > quirky and incomplete, WHY DOESN'T THIS WORK RIGHT" is better than "It's > TCL? I don't know that, let me hit stackoverflow and do a little > reading" as would be the common experience. Especially if we document > up-front what the quirks we have are. Point taken. But if you think this to an end, the result is: lets write some documentation and explain the limitations of a shell in U-Boot environment, and document the warts and bugs of this (or an updated) version of hush. This should make more users happy than completely new and incompatible stuff. Frankly, I believe when you run into problems with hush in U-Boot (even the current version) you should lean back and think about what you are doing. U-Boot is a boot loader, and while it is powerful enough to do complex things, this is not necessarily the most clever approach. 15 years ago, I've written complex update scripts for U-Boot. This was easy enough to do, and worked perfectly. But there are so many limitations in a boot loader environment. We don't do this any more. Instead, we use an OS suitable for such tasks (Linux with SWUpdate). And talking about problems and limitations in U-Boot... Is the CLI really our biggest concern right now? None of our users (customers) has asked for a better command interpreter - the question we hear are more like: "When will you support IPv6?", "NFS does not work with recent Linux distros, will this be fixed?", "Can I download over WiFi?", "Can I download using HTTP/HTTPS?", "How can I harden U-Boot for security-critical environments?", etc. Best regards, Wolfgang Denk -- DENX Software Engineering GmbH, Managing Director: Wolfgang Denk HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: w...@denx.de Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way.
