Re: [avr-gcc-list] What is the recommended route to build avr-gcc with support for newer processors?

[Joerg Wunsch]

"Nigel Winterbottom" <address@hidden> wrote:

> I cannot find any Windows build instructions on the WinAVR home page
> or WinAVR project page so must assume Eric Weddington wants to keep
> this a secret.

No, he simply didn't have the time to write it down.  (Heck, he didn't
even find the time to eventually assemble a new version for several
months now...)  The instructions would probably look like Kai
Klenovsek's instructions, except that WinAVR has a lot more stuff
included than just binutils/compiler/avr-libc, so there would be much
more instructions.  Also, Kai's description misses the patches as well
(as supporting new devices wasn't his primary goal).

I second Alexei's opinion.  If you're familiar with Unix environments,
both of the options (FreeBSD ports/packages, Debian packages) will
certainly give you the same amount of support, but they also basically
require that you use the Unix platform for the complete development
then.  There are basically two reasons why Unix environments are a lot
more flexible here to provide updated versions (well, maybe three of
them :):

. The tools (at least most of them, if you exclude PN2) have natively
  been written for Unix, so they ``just compile'' there out of the
  box.  The required C compiler and other tools are often either
  natively available on these systems (Linux, *BSD), or can be very
  easily added (Solaris, MacOS X), much simpler than it appears to be
  with these tools for Win32 environments.

. The existing package systems make it fairly easy to split the task.
  Instead of a big, large environment like WinAVR that includes
  everything you need to work with an AVR but which also requires a
  lot of effort for each new version to produce, upgrades can easily
  be made piecewise, and are often a matter of less than an hour for
  the maintainer (I should know :).

. As FreeBSD is my personal choice for an operating system, upgrading
  the avr-libc port in the FreeBSD ports system is usually my very
  first job after rolling a new avr-libc release itself, as this
  upgrade serves as an ``everything works fine'' burn-in test for the
  newly created avr-libc release.  So it's almost a side-effect of my
  release procedure for avr-libc.  As adding new AVR devices to
  avr-libc requires that they have been added to binutils and compiler
  before, at least that part of upgrading these tools in the FreeBSD
  ports is also rather a side-effect of my normal avr-libc development
  work.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)