[Solved] rpi5-eeprom should depend or opt-depend on flashrom

[denk]

The eeprom of the RPi 5 can be written to directly, if the env variable RPI_EEPROM_USE_FLASHROM is set to 1. However, for this to work, the tool flashrom is necessary. It would be great, if this could be added as an dependency of rpi5-eeprom. If flashrom is not installed, the failing direct flash and falling back to the alternative way by updating via boot files is not mentioned in the output of rpi-eeprom-update. This took me some time, to find out, why it is not working.

[graysky]

I believe the recommended way to update the eeprom is advertised by pacman's output upon installing the package. It is not to directly flash, but to use the tool to write the image to /boot and then do it upon rebooting.

[denk]

[quote="graysky"]I believe the recommended way to update the eeprom is advertised by pacman's output upon installing the package. It is not to directly flash, but to use the tool to write the image to /boot and then do it upon rebooting.[/quote]

I think, there is a misunderstanding. I was referring to the output of the executable rpi-eeprom-update. If I set RPI_EEPROM_USE_FLASHROM=1 in the file /etc/rpi-eeprom-update-default, without having flashrom installed, the update of the eeprom is still done via the usual way by putting the eeprom update files in /boot. However, the output of rpi-eeprom-update doesn't mention, that it couldn't use flashrom due to it is not installed. So my proposal was to include flashrom as a dependency (depends or optdepends) in the PKGBUILD of rpi-eeprom-update, that the users at least gets a hint, that flashrom might be useful. I hope, it is more understandable now.

[graysky]

I see, it can be an optdepends. What functionality does it provide? Useful for ....

[denk]

I am talking about the feature to directly flash the eeprom update, without reboot. This has been merged here: https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/commit/6b14e84a2fb2e1f7220a404f65e7e0985f07c9e5
This is so far not the default but, in the future it maybe.

[graysky]

I added it to 20240108-1

[denk]

[quote="graysky"]I added it to 20240108-1[/quote]
Thank you very much!