Improve UBI user space tools


 * Summary: Improve UBI userspace tools
 * Proposer: Ezequiel García 
 * Status: Not selected in 2013 to be sponsored by the CE Workgroup

Description
Currently the UBI tools are a bit messy and not straight-forward to use. In addition, there are quite a few different -yet related- commands to accomplish different stages of an UBI/UBIFS preparation or flashing.

A possible way of dealing with such complexity would be revisiting these tools and introduce a new centralized tool (git-like), with sub-commands for the different tasks.

The benefit of this effort is obviously to simplify the (exceedingly) complicated task of dealing with UBI and UBI volumes setup, both off-box and in-box (presumably for developers testings).

For instance, the ubinize tool requires the setup of an 'ini' file specifying the volumes configuration, which is usually a bit annoying.

Related work
I'm not aware of any

Scope
A first working proposal of the centralized tool could be complete in 4 weeks. This work should be done as close to upstream as possible to come up with something useful to regular UBI users.

Contractor Candidates
None yet.

Reasons for CEWG not selecting this project
Most CE companies are moving away from raw NAND towards eMMC for CE products. So UBIFS-related projects were not favored. Also, we had no bids for these projects.