[avr-libc-dev] AVR toolchain patch hell

[Eric Weddington]

Hello All,

I've sent this to everyone individually because I'm unsure who is subscribed
to which avr mailing list (avr-libc-dev, avr-gcc-list, CCed). Especially you
Denis and Marek; I don't know if either of you are still subscribed to any
list at all. Also, I apologize in advance for such a long email. I know
English is not everyone else's native language (except you Brian); and I
don't speak German, Russian, or Polish. ;-)

We're starting to be in AVR toolchain patch hell, and especially for GCC
4.1.x. Here are some points to consider:

- Joerg has a set of patches that he keeps for the FreeBSD AVR toolchain in
the Ports system.
- I have a set of patches for the WinAVR distribution. Joerg and I at least
try to do some level of coordination.
- Bernd and Rolf have another set of patches for the AVR-Ada project:
<http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/avr-ada/trunk/patches/>. Some are avr-ada
specific, some patches are for AVR GCC bug reports. I know that Bernd and
Rolf help out sometimes on the base AVR toolchain, and they do some level of
coordination on patches. And Bernd is copied on all my traffic on GCC
Bugzilla.
- Bjoern has other patches that are in process
- There are currently 56 GCC bugs for the AVR target
- There are currently 3 Binutils bugs for the AVR target
- There are currently 11 avr-libc bugs
- There are currently 2 avr-ada bugs
- There are currently 3 avrdude bugs
- Denis and Marek are the sole maintainers for the AVR target, and Marek has
said recently that he doesn't have time for any more AVR toolchain stuff.
- Joerg has been doing a lot of maintenance on avr-libc, avrdude, and
avarice.
- We only see an occasional Linux maintainer (gentoo, debian) and they
usually just grab a limited number of existing patches and don't seem to
help much upstream.
- We have no GDB maintainer since Ted Roth left, and the avr port of GDB is
starting to bit-rot.
- And I haven't been helping much lately either. Shame on me.

That leaves one person (Denis) as the bottleneck for committing patches into
binutils and gcc for the avr target. I note that Bjoern has been able to get
some of the other gcc people to do commits.

I'm not trying to place blame on anyone; I just want to describe the current
situation. I know that every one on this list has been extremely valuable in
helping to move the avr toolchain forward, and for that, I am extremely
grateful.

But right now, it is difficult to take a stock released version of the tools
and build a decent toolchain from them. Everything has to be patched, or
really should be patched. Some of that can be blamed on Atmel Norway for
releasing new versions of chips every quarter. But there isn't much
coordination about patches, and it's extremely difficult to track down all
available patches, get them working for release X, and especially getting
them rolled into the mainlines of the various projects. I'd also finally
like to get avr-ada into the mainstream of all the distributions; Bernd,
Rolf, I know I've said this before.

So I am requesting of you: what can we do to help this situation?

- Can we get more people to be official maintainers of the avr port of
binutils and gcc? That way there won't be such a bottleneck in getting
patches committed to mainline.
- Can we figure out some level of coordination between all the various
distros as to what should be the patch list for a particular release?
- Can we get more volunteers? To help with either testing unconfirmed bug
reports, coding patches, testing patches, etc.

What else?

I'm also committing more time now to the overall toolchain. I want to help
the overall situation, especially with all the various bug reports

Thanks for your consideration,

Eric Weddington