Hi All, It looks like I'm a bit behind in the thread. So I'll commit a faux pas here and see if I can reply to a bunch of comments, in random order, and without interleaving the thread.
Yeah, Cygwin is a pain to use. I mean it's great to use for porting *nix software, for one's self. But redistribution is where the gotcha comes in, because everything gets linked to the cygwin1.dll and it doesn't play nicely with other versions of itself. The only alternative is MinGW, but then it sucks as a build platform because it doesn't have nearly as many packages as Cygwin does. Over the years I've finally learned that I have to have both Cygwin and MinGW for development; Cygwin for all the build tools, but build with the MinGW compilers. I've also learned that the club of people who are building cross-GCC compilers using Cygwin/MinGW is *very* small. So the "repository of common knowledge" is still very small. I learn something new every time I build WinAVR. Avrdude has had the advantage that, when Brian opened it up and we (Brian, Joerg, myself, and Ted Roth) did the porting effort, it was designed with layers for different OSes. This certainly made it much easier to have it build under Cygwin/MinGW. Avarice and simulavr have never done this in the past, and will have to go through this process in the future to have them ported to MinGW. Something that I've wanted done for a long time. Yeah it took me awhile to go find all the tools needed to build the avr-libc docs. Part of the problem was that I wasn't always on the lookout for the tools. I admit that it was much easier to just download the existing documentation. But, I also admit, that the tools situation on Windows has steadily improved over the years. It's becoming easier and easier to do all the same things as on *nix. Yeah it's a bit odd that the MSP430 development is not done in the FSF tree. But, hey, it's to the AVR's advantage. ;-) Although, I hate to admit that I wasn't aware that there was a GCC port for Microchip's products. I had heard of a possible port a while back (1-2 years ago maybe?) but I never knew what came of it. Pointers welcome. I've been really amazed at this thread and the people contributing to this thread. This has to be one of the most civil discussions about Operating Systems and software that I've been a part of in a long time! :-) Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Microsoft Windows and its lack of reliability and I really detest Microsoft's business practices. But I'm also a bit of a pragmatist in that there are many, many users on Windows, for one reason or another. I agree the installation system (or lack thereof) on Windows is maddening, and I'm a victim of it. Joerg has talked to me about having a more fine-grained installer for, what, a couple of years now? I still think that it's a good idea, but it also means a lot of work in trying to implement it. *nix systems, such as the FreeBSD ports system are better designed for things like this. For Windows and WinAVR, I have to do all the heavy lifting to implement it. And honestly, I haven't made time for it. From my view there are many other places where the toolchain could be improved, such as running the GCC regression test on a regular basis. :-) It's funny, but one my long-term goals in doing WinAVR was always to introduce Windows users to the concept of Open Source software with the intent that they would use more and more and eventually move away from Windows to an open source OS. I've now seen some fruits of this in that there are a number of users on AVR Freaks who have openly said that they have moved, or are moving, to Linux. It's funny because I have yet to make the move myself. :-) But some of this is changing in that I now have a dual boot Linux machine (Fedora/Ubuntu) at work that I will use for a lab computer. @Brian: Things have been going very well. Very busy, but very well. :-) Hope things have been well with you too. Anyway, I might've forgotten something, but I hoped I covered the thread... Eric Weddington _______________________________________________ AVR-chat mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-chat
