Re: [avrdude-dev] Fix warnings patch

[Brian Dean]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 03:11:43PM +0000, E. Weddington wrote:

> I'm all for including more in the docs than just having a 
> reformat of the man page. And certainly a FAQ would be nice.

Excellent!  Thanks to both you and Joerg for volunteering :-)
Seriously though, I think this is a great idea.  The manual now was
basically a rough duplicate of the man page because Windoze doesn't
have the concept of man pages, and without that, there'd be no Windows
doc at all.

> I would certainly recommend reconsidering the usage of -e. 
> It's definitely more common to erase then program, than 
> programming without erasing. Why require a switch for 
> common usage?

I really don't have any major objection to this.  I only wonder if the
decibel level of complaints will be louder if we go the other way.  We
may instead have people then complain that: "Why did my eeprom get
erased when I programmed my flash?"  That assumes a programming
sequence of: erase, program eeprom, program flash.  That would do the
wrong thing if an erase cycle defaulted before programming the flash.

Of course, we could make avrdude a little smarter by depricating the
-f -i/-o and -m options and prefering folks use -U instead.  Then,
avrdude can look at all the memory operations specified and if any one
of them specify the flash, then do an erase cycle before starting any
programming.  This would do the right thing most of the time, assuming
folks specified all their memory programming on one command line and
not across multiple invocations.

Just my 2 cents.  If we want to change the default, I won't object
(too loudly :-))

Cheers,
-Brian