Re: [avrdude-dev] Avrdude Gui problem

[Dave N6NZ]

Joerg Wunsch wrote:
> Basically, I don't care about *which* GUI toolkit is used as long as
> the current Unix/Win32/MacOS platform support can also be maintained
> for the GUI.
And there lies the challenge.  Before seeing this, I hadn't heard of 
Lazarus -- looks interesting, I used Delphi briefly several years ago. 
Lately I have been doing some work with Gambas -- and I'm very impressed 
with it.

But the catch with any of the RAD tools is going cross-platform.  Gambas 
is *nix only, I believe, although OS X has been in the works -- I 
haven't followed the current status of that work.  But with any RAD 
tool, even if the language is available everywhere, all the controls 
that you use must be available on all platforms as well.

I'm not as convinced as Joerg that we need to have the same gui on all 
platforms.  I'm not convinced windows users even care, since they have 
WinAVR and can use AVR Studio for programming.

Instead I would suggest that we work to make control wrappers around the 
avrdude library .so that exports the same functionality and interface as 
much as possible to all tools.  I looked very briefly at doing a wrapper 
to create a Gambas control around the library.  What's the OS X 
equivalent? Is that Cocoa? Anyway... if the control had the same 
interface (as much as possible) on all RAD platforms, then it would make 
sense to build the control as part of Avrdude and let the GUI's be 
separate projects.  Unless there is a good cross platform RAD tool -- 
but I'm not aware of any.

So... I foresee a future where:
./configure --with-gambas --prefix=/usr...

would leave me with a control that could be incorporated into a Gambas 
project.  There could be a --with-cocoa, I presume, and a 
--with-visualbasic if someone were so motivated.

But, let me play the cranky old Luddite for a moment... beyond fuses, 
what's the point of a gui?  A gui is a lousy make target. 99% of what I 
would want from an avrdude gui would be handled by a "pretend mode" for 
fuse updates that printed a nice report and warning messages.  But I'm 
prepared to be modernized.

-dave