Simon Glass <sjg@chromium.org> says:

When the SPL build-phase was first created it was designed to solve a
particular problem (the need to init SDRAM so that U-Boot proper could
be loaded). It has since expanded to become an important part of U-Boot,
with three phases now present: TPL, VPL and SPL

Due to this history, the term 'SPL' is used to mean both a particular
phase (the one before U-Boot proper) and all the non-proper phases.
This has become confusing.

For a similar reason CONFIG_SPL_BUILD is set to 'y' for all 'SPL'
phases, not just SPL. So code which can only be compiled for actual SPL,
for example, must use something like this:

   #if defined(CONFIG_SPL_BUILD) && !defined(CONFIG_TPL_BUILD)

In Makefiles we have similar issues. SPL_ has been used as a variable
which expands to either SPL_ or nothing, to chose between options like
CONFIG_BLK and CONFIG_SPL_BLK. When TPL appeared, a new SPL_TPL variable
was created which expanded to...