Re: [avrdude-dev] Butterfly (was: Before a release...)

[Brian Dean]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 12:35:10AM +0100, Jan-Hinnerk Reichert wrote:

> > > Most of the duplicated functions are empty anyway. Perhaps we
> > > should change the default-functions in "pgm.c". So, that
> > > non-critical functions - like setting a LED - don't return an
> > > error, if they are undefined
> >
> > This would be a nice thing to do. It would simplify both, avr910.c
> > and butterfly.c.
> 
> Has anyone else an opinion on this?

Sorry for not responding sooner - I've been away for a few days.

Are you asking about the proposal to implement some kind of 'subtype'
field or the behaviour of unimplemented non-critical programmer
functions?

I'm not real keen on a 'subtype' field, but I can see where it might
make programmers that are mostly the same but have minor differences
easier to add.  However, it can also become more difficult to keep the
logic clean due to lots of conditionals differentiating the different
programmer subtypes.  I'd probably call the field 'variant' :-)

But I think I probably come down more on the side of a new programmer,
in general, unless the differences are really minor.  However, it
would be nice to make simple stubs in each programmer's implementation
that then call a common set of functions to try and minimize code
duplication where it makes sense.  But some / most of the functions
are so short and simple that duplicating the code is not a huge deal
in most cases.

Regarding the default behaviour of non-critical functions like LED
setting - I'm all for making these be optional and perhaps initialized
to a default function that does nothing.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
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http://www.bsdhome.com/
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