Comment 12 for bug 671027

dell systems dont have to ship the BIOS on disk ... think more like grub here ;)

our image build system puts the u-boot.bin binary in place for arches that dont boot from NAND, to have this binary available we need a package ... if your platform doesnt need u-boot.bin on the SD thats indeed a moot point.

we dont have source code for source codes sake but to be
a) GPL compliant and
b) enable developers to easily build changed binaries if they want to enhance it or help with bug fixing

users wont build u-boot with "varoius compiler versions", what we make sure is that u-boot is built with the supported compiler for that one release. feel free to do as you like but note that the ubuntu image build system does not have any internet access during build time, there is only a local package archive mirror so having a binary package of the bootloader, be it grub, syslinux, isolinux or u-boot is a requirement for any officially built image, it is how it is, there is nothing to discuss about it :)

oh, and on a side note there is work going on to generalize flash-kernel more (see the subarch detection spec) so it will have more generic ways to access partitions (hopefully soon) at some point

you are right that this duplication is a mess and i think flash-kernel upstream (debian) as well as anyone else working with it is aware that this is a shortcoming in its design.