#1756 NORM Trial-2: 'boot-file' environment variable misnamed

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#1756: 'boot-file' environment variable misnamed
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  Reporter:  dwmw2                |       Owner:  wmb at firmworks.com
      Type:  defect               |      Status:  closed           
  Priority:  normal               |   Milestone:  Trial-2          
 Component:  ofw - open firmware  |     Version:                   
Resolution:  wontfix              |    Keywords:                   
  Verified:  0                    |  
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Changes (by wmb at firmworks.com):

  * status:  new => closed
  * resolution:  => wontfix

Comment:

 This turns out to be very painful to fix, because

 a) Configuration variables are not ordinary Forth words.  My attempts to
 make an alias "cmdline" for the existing "boot-file" variable failed in
 various interesting ways because of the special properties of such words.
 Fixing that would require some deep changes that risk destabilizing the
 code, which we can ill afford at this point, and which seem hardly worth
 the effort.

 b) Simply changing the name of "boot-file" to e.g. "cmdline" would be a
 massive hassle because we have lots of existing "olpc.fth" files in the
 field that use the name "boot-file".  The migration would be a total pain
 in the ass and greatly increase our support load, again something we
 cannot afford right now.

 c) Changing to forward slashes is much harder than it might seem, because
 OFW pathnames already use forward slashes to separate the path components
 in the device tree portion of a canonical device specifier.  If we were to
 say, for example, sd:/boot/foo, that expands to the canonical path
 /sd/disk:/boot/foo , which the main path parser interprets as 4-deep path
 in the device tree, instead of the correct interpretation of a 2-deep
 device tree path with a string argument applied to the last path
 component.  Changing that behavior would require extensive changes in the
 deepest part of the pathname parser.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1756#comment:3>
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