Proposal: new device-tree syntax and semantics for extendinginformation from included dts files

[David Gibson]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 05:58:06PM -0600, Grant Likely wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Stephen Neuendorffer
> <stephen.neuendorffer at xilinx.com> wrote:
> > The ambiguity between
> > bar; (referring to a property)
> > and
> > /trim-node/ bar; (referring to a node)
> >
> > Seems awkward, but perhaps unavoidable.  At the very least, I don't have anything better to suggest.. :)
> >
> > perhaps in an ideal world, open firmware would originally have distinguished these by
> > having
> >
> > bar =;   // Create an empty property
> > bar {};  // Create an empty node
> >
> > or something...
> 
> Actually, none of this is OpenFirmware related.  This syntax was
> created for use with dtc which is completely independent of
> OpenFirmware.  Only the device tree structure and usage conventions
> are shared with dtc.

That's true.  However, I'm pretty sure there was actually a reason
related to existing OF usage why I made the syntax for an empty
property 'thing;' rather than 'thing =;'.  I no longer remember what
it was, though.

> However, we've already got a large userbase so making an incompatible
> source file format change would be unbelievably painful.

That too.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
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