On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 1:42 PM, David Brown
<address@hidden> wrote:
On 04/03/2011 05:23, Weddington, Eric wrote:
Hi Stu,
Hope you're doing well. :-)
WinAVR is the Windows packaging of the AVR-GCC stuff, along with
the avr-libc library.
Along with some other stuff, too. ;-)
(In addition, WinAVR is about to be deprecated in favor of a
toolset integrated into AVR Studio. It is on it's last official
release, at least officially.)
Officially, it's up to me what to do with WinAVR. Admittedly there
hasn't been a lot of incentive what with AS5 coming out with a
toolchain.
However, based on some discussion on AVR Freaks, I'm reconsidering.
(This is going to sound like an "I want" rant - which I suppose it is. Ultimately, these are things I want Atmel to stand behind - paying people or sponsoring contributors as appropriate. I pay Atmel for the chips we buy, and it's even possible that I will have a chance to help with these ideas (I keep hoping to have spare time one day), but I think it would have to be Atmel that forms the base here.)
I am a professional developer, and my company uses AVR's in many of our products. What I need is consistent toolchains - primarily the compiler and library. The toolchain is part of each project I work with - if I run a project with WinAVR-20080512, then that will typically be the toolchain I use for that project for ever after. You don't change toolchains in a project without very good reason - it's too big a risk, and involves too much re-qualification and extra testing.
So I have a range of WinAVR compilers on my machine - typically about one or two releases a year. They are archived and backed up just like my source code. The makefiles for my project each refer explicitly to a given version of the toolchain.
If I need to work on the same projects on a different machine, I can therefore easily install exactly the same toolchain there, and continue as before.
It is vital that I can take an old project, re-compile it with the same toolchain and the same options, and generate a bit-perfect copy of the old binary target file.
As I say, WinAVR has made this easy for me on Windows. The AvrTools release from Atmel's web site also works fine for this.
But I worry about the heavy integration in AS5. I fully understand Atmel is trying to make a system that is easy to use - but it is important to remember how professionals work, or at least how they /should/ work. It is conceivable that I can install different versions of AS5 in different directories as they come out, and archive them just as I do with the WinAVR toolchains. But that is getting very inefficient. It would be much better to always use the latest IDE and debugger, while choosing the toolchain on a project basis. This means, at the very least, that the toolchain should remain separate from the IDE.
Another issue is cross-platform development. It is certainly possible to build avr-gcc and avr-libc on Linux and other platforms - lots of people do so. But for professional work, the toolchain should be identical. Again, I should be able to compile the same source code and get a bit-perfect target code binary on either Windows or Linux (or other platforms) - only then is the toolchain cross-platform. This /can/ be done at the moment, but it is not an easy job to ensure that you have all the right patches and source versions. The patch sets provided with WinAVR (and AvrTools3.0.0.240) are an excellent starting point - but it could easily be made very much smoother. All that is needed is a set of three downloads for each release - a Windows binary package, a Linux binary package, and a source tarball with the build scripts for Linux, Windows mingw, and maybe other systems.
This is not actually anything new for Atmel - they have had something like this for the AVR32 for years. But what is missing is a consistency and simplicity, and transparency. There is a lot of stuff available from Atmel - but most of it is hidden by somewhat random placements. If you want to get the latest build of avr-gcc for Windows, you get it by following links for the AVR32 - not exactly intuitive. And if you want to get a specific older version, such as AvrTools3.0.0.240 - tough luck, Atmel apparently doesn't see the need for archives of older software. And of course when you have found what you want, you have to "register" to get the download. But it is not "registering" - it is a inconvenient, obtrusive and repetitive file-in-the-form-and-we'll-email-you-a-link system.
avr-gcc and avr-libc is an incredible tool. It is a professional quality development tool - but it is currently suffering from less than professional distribution from Atmel. I don't believe it would take a lot of effort or investment from Atmel's side - just an understanding of what developers need. I even think much of it is already in place, simply hidden away. But unless Atmel do something here, we will end up with fragmentation. Professionals need to have a source of "official" versions of the toolchain - ready built for the platform of their choice - and they need that source to be easily found from obvious places such as Atmel's website.
As an aside, why on earth did Atmel base AS5 on Visual Studio? The world and its dog uses Eclipse, as does Atmel for their AVR32 Studio. As more people move towards Eclipse and cross-platform development, Atmel has taken a giant leap backwards here. And it turns out that I can't install it anyway - my main machine runs XP service pack 2, and the AS5 installation insists on service pack 3. I look forward to more WinAVR releases.
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