RE: [avr-gcc-list] Installing WinAVR 20070122 broke older 3.4.5install?

[Eric Weddington]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> address@hidden 
> [mailto:address@hidden
> org] On Behalf Of Joerg Wunsch
> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 2:09 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [avr-gcc-list] Installing WinAVR 20070122 broke 
> older 3.4.5install?
> 
> 
> >  HKLM\Software\Free Software Foundation\WinAVR\WinAVR_20060421\GCC
> >  HKLM\Software\Free Software 
> Foundation\WinAVR\WinAVR_20060421\BINUTILS
> >  HKLM\Software\Free Software Foundation\WinAVR\WinAVR_20060421\G++
> 
> This is not possible without modifying all the GNU tools.  What would
> have been possible were to use ... FSF\WinAVR_<version>\GCC etc.

Which may be possible, btw.

I agree that the situation can be improved w.r.t allowing multiple
installations.

Thanks, Bruce, for providing some concrete solutions.

The main problem that I've been dealing with since 2002 has been that the
GCC model is to build your compiler from source. GCC was not designed to be
relocated after it is built, as is the model with most Windows programs.

In the last few weeks, there was finally some help in the GCC project. A GCC
bug (that I opened) was finally fixed that makes GCC not look at the
configured prefix for relocated compilers.
<http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17621> This was fixed for the
4.3 branch.

I haven't had time to test the official fixes, but I have other, older
patches, that are supposed to do the same thing. My intent is to see how
well the solution works and see if those patches can be backported for the
WinAVR distro.

So now it's time to revisit this whole issue and make it so WinAVR won't
have any problems in being relocated, as well as allowing multiple
installations, vis-a-vis registry settings, environment variables or
whatever. Registry settings seemed like the thing to do at the time, because
one can associate a distro with a distro-specific registry key such as:
..FSF\WinAVR_<version>\GCC etc.

My concern with doing enviornment variables is that AFAIK, it does not allow
different distros,.e.g. what if one has both an AVR GCC distro (WinAVR) and
an ARM GCC distro (WinARM)?

I'm open to suggestions that will work for all scenarios.

Thanks for a good discussion.
Eric Weddington