Re: [avr-libc-dev] RFC: Database for device properties.?

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Eric Weddington wrote:

> Atmel distributes a lot of this information in AVR Studio as XML
> files.

Unfortunately, we are not allowed to redistribute them.  In theory,
you are not even allowed to have them at all on a non-Windows machine:
the only permitted way to redistribute AVR Studio (which they are
bundled with) is as the entire installation package, and that package
cannot be run except on native Windows (not even under Wine).  There's
no option to extract anything out of it besides running the full
installer. :-(

This is somewhat braindead.

If there's someone knowledgable with XSL, it might be an option to use
XSL stylesheets to extract the required information out of these
files.  We might have to add local information anyway.

> >database ---HEADER_FILE_GENERATOR1---> header file for gcc
> >database ---HEADER_FILE_GENERATOR2---> header file for binutils

It would be way cool if GCC and binutils used some kind of external
file for that information, so we don't have to patch their binaries in
order to add each new MCU type.  However, I've got no idea whether a
feature like that one would get accepted by the binutils and GCC
maintainers.

> >database ---HEADER_FILE_GENERATOR3---> header file for avr-libc

Btw., there are already some stubs around in avr-libc to do this.  Ted
Roth's idea was to extract the desired information out of the Atmel
XML files, compile some avr-libc specific XML file out of it (which
can legally be stored as part of avr-libc), and eventually generate a
header file out of that one.

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

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