Re: [avrdude-dev] Atmel's XML part description files

[E. Weddington]

Russell Shaw wrote:

> E. Weddington wrote:
>
> > E. Weddington wrote:
> >
> > > The other issue has to do with licensing. We need to check with 
> > > Atmel if it's ok to redistribute their XML files. I can check on that.
> >
> > Bad news on this. I just got word from Atmel, and we do NOT have 
> > permission to redistribute Atmel's XML part description files.
> >
> > But, I suppose, we're always free to make our own.
> >
> > It's a shame that they're unwilling to do this.
>
>
> Could just make an xml-to-whatever-you-want compiler. Could even
> generate C files that way.


True.
Ted Roth contributed a Python program to avr-libc (a while back) that 
would convert Atmel's XML part files to C headers.

One could certainly put together a transform using XSLT.

One could even use this project (XMLStarlet):
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmlstar>
This is a command line utility to transform XML files. You can create a 
command line that will do the transform and then spit out the XSLT 
version of the transform. It's a very handy tool.

We could easily come up with an XSLT transformation that would take an 
Atmel XML part file and just pull out the programming data that is 
needed for avrdude and put it in a newly created XML file that would 
ship with avrdude.

The advantages about using XML, over the current text format of the 
avrdude config file, is that XML is well known, there are libs and tools 
available, and one doesn't need to use Bison/Flex/Yacc/Lex to build 
avrdude. The disadvantages are that the XML files are bigger, and now 
one is dependent upon a library, rather than Bison,etc.

In the end, it's just a file format.

At this point, though, it would probably be best to just get the STK500 
version 2 protocol working. :-)

Eric