1) it will save little space at all. Here are all the strings for the arima/hdama Arima HDAMA mainboard AMD 8111 NSC 87360 socket 940 AMD K8 Northbridge Arima HDAMA mainboard AMD 8111
It is 105 bytes. Compressed by itself with gzip -3 it is 99 bytes. that's conservative because on a bigger binary the dictionary will be better and it will probably get smaller. If we're that tight we're in big trouble and it is time to move c_payload to 0xfffe0000, not fool around removing this type of nit, which will only buy us a small amount of time.
2) The string names could be printed as SPEW by the device tree code as it walks the tree, and aid comprehension.That code is not in yet but it is trivial to write and should go in.
If people are really that worried about it, I can add an option to config.g and you can #ifdef to the .c files using that name. I don't see the point but if you really need that 99 or so bytes I guess that you can do that.
This issue brings up an important question. We have just made a far-reaching set of changes that had to be made -- but we impacted every port in V2. We need to start being careful about how global changes are made.
With the current user base growing rapidly I think we're going to need to create a formal process for this type of global change. This would be (e.g.) a Configuration Review Board composed of stakeholders that would vote up or down on changes. I think we are almost past the point where people can make big changes such as this with no consultation. I try to consult via the mailing list but I don't think that always works. Any comments on this idea?
ron