Re: [avr-gcc-list] Living With Atmel Studio 6.0

[David Brown]

On 09/08/2012 16:42, David Kelly wrote:
> I think its time to start a new thread leveraged off another:
>
> On Aug 9, 2012, at 9:05 AM, David Brown wrote:
>
> > For what it's worth, I too dislike the newer AVR Studio - partly
> > because I do most of my development work with Linux, and partly
> > because even on Windows it is a bloated mess.  I can't figure out
> > why they decided to use MS VS as a base - the industry has
> > practically standardised on Eclipse, and the single biggest request
> > from users for AVR Studio 5 was that it be cross-platform.  But I
> > guess Atmel had their reasons, and they are certainly good at
> > making the compiler toolchain easily available from Linux, so I
> > don't want to complain /too/ much.
>
> Being the AVR-gcc list the development environment isn't really
> on-topic but most seem to acquire avr-gcc bundled in Atmel Studio.
>
> When I started on AVR an editor was bundled in WinAVR that I came to
> like. AVR Studio was only launched to debug. CVS was used, and also
> served as an rsync between my preferred editing machine (oddly that
> was nvi on FreeBSD via PuTTY, but also often BBEdit on Mac) and my
> debugging machine (XP). That is a mode I could happily return to. And
> might again. And a means for Atmel to meet their cross-platform
> goals. Forget the editor, just get the debugger right.
>
> But sometimes the right professional thing to do is not customize our
> development environments so much that another could not reasonably
> replicate and continue our work. That currently binds me to Atmel
> Studio 6.

I see that point - but I think a replicateable build system trumps a 
common IDE.  And Atmel's idea of bundling everything with an enormous 
IDE, and having new installations overwrite and update existing ones, 
makes that nearly impossible (in particular, the installer gives you no 
choice about your installation path, and messes up your PATH without 
asking you).

You simply cannot do professional development work that way - it is a 
fundamental requirement that you keep the tools stable for a project. 
This means that if a project is developed using the avr toolchain 3.2.0, 
you continue using it even if you also have 3.4.0 installed on the 
machine.  And an archive of toolchain 3.2.0 needs to be kept accessible, 
so that at any time you can replicate the build environment used for the 
project.  Of course, you may migrate an existing 3.2.0 project over to 
3.4.0 - but you must consider it a major change, and expect extra 
testing and checking, because things change between toolchain versions.

This means that whatever editor you use, you need to do your builds 
using specific toolchains - not the IDE's default toolchain.

Similarly, you need to have compile-time options and flags tied 
explicitly to the project - you can't rely on default flags from any 
particular version of the IDE.  So that means external makefiles.

And once you've got external makefiles, externally managed source files, 
and externally managed toolchains, then it's pretty easy to use whatever 
editor you want.  You can then do a "build" at any time, without having 
to involve the editor.  As a bonus, your builds will usually be much 
faster than via the IDE (especially if you use "make -j").

> So asking of others suffering with AS6, what SVN client do you use?
> Am thinking I should advance from TortoiseSVN running outside of the
> dreaded VS10 shell to something integrated. Perhaps something that
> knows more about what needs to be saved and what doesn't. Something
> that knows the files are in a savable state so I don't have to exit
> AS6 to make sure everything is properly flushed to disk.

You should be highly sceptical about using integrated SVN clients in 
other programs.  It is important that you don't mix major version 
numbers of the svn clients on a machine - you'll end up corrupting your 
local svn metadata, or at least getting error messages about version 
compatibility.  So install TortoiseSVN gui client /and/ command line 
tools, and stick to integrated svn clients that work using external 
command-line tools.  (This is for brain-dead windows, of course - on 
Linux or BSD you install the subversion client libraries once, and all 
programs use that automatically.)

You should not have to exit AS6 to make it save files (or else it is 
worse than I thought).  As to which files to store in the svn 
repository, that is up to you.  I store the source files (obviously), 
Makefiles, and often the final .hex file (since it makes it convenient 
for testing or programming from different machines).

mvh.,

David