Re: [avrdude-dev] Re: [AVR-Chat] AVRDUDE 5.0 BETA Release

[Russell Shaw]

Mike Perks wrote:
> Brian,
>
> I sometimes like to use AVRDude as an alternative to AVRProg. However I
> have found the following problems continue to exist in even the AVRDude
> 5.0 Beta. This is frank input that I hope will spur you to improve AVRDude.
>
> 1. I tried building my own version from source and found the makefile
> schema impenetrable. I understand why some of the complexity is there
> but unless you have the environment setup correctly, it doesn't work. In
> the end I fudged the makefile and did build a Windows version with GCC.
> I am a software engineer so I'm not a newbieat this type of thing.

I assume you were looking at configure.ac/in and automake.am ?
The Makefile is machine generated and is not supposed to be looked
at by the usual developers. That said, you *can* understand the actions
of these files after learning autoconf/automake, and are very useful
for debugging.
...

> Few people are going to bother testing AVRDude 5.0 if there is no
> Windows version and no documentation on exactly what it does.

Few *windoze* users will test a non-windoze version. If you want
the latest and greatest things built on non-windoze systems, then
you have to be using or be familiar with the same non-windoze systems.
Windoze is just an appliance for dispensing commercial software to
end-users that happens to work for *some* free software. It doesn't
have a decent infrastructure for free unix-like software development.