Re: [avr-libc-dev] RFC: Database for device properties.?

[Eric Weddington]

Uwe Fechner wrote:
> Björn Haase wrote:
>
> > In this case, however, I'd like to 
> > suggest to try to find a format that could be edited by some sort of GUI.
> >
> > Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> >
> > Bjoern
> >  
>
> I think, xml is the format of choice.
>
> I made the same suggestion some time ago in the avr-freaks forum.
>
> At that time, I thought it would be a good idea, to evaluate the
> xml-database at runtime,
> and I was told that this would be too slow.
>
> But a code generator generating C code from an xml file should be the
> best solution.
>
> I have wrote some code-generators (xml to C) at work, using Borland Delphi.

Why do yet another XML tool, when there are some freely available:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmlstar
This is an open source project that is XML manipulation tools that are 
command line driven.


> For editing xml-files there are many good solutions, e.g. emacs or
> oxygen or ...
>
> There is something like xml-forms, too.
>
> One problem is, that we cannot redistribute the xml device definition
> file from atmel
> without their permission (Jörn asked them for a permission and they said
> no.)

Agreed.

> Therefore it might be a good idea, to create an own format, that can be
> filled from
> the atmel xml file (well, to 95%) with a little converter.

Why? We would be converting from XML to C language, which will then be 
included in the toolchain source code. We don't need to create another 
format just for redistribution.

--
Eric Weddington