[Amforth] AmForth Weekend 3 (2020-08-29/30)

[Erich W. <ew....@na...>]

Dear AmForthers,

as previously announced I made this weekend the official

    AmForth Weekend 3 / 2020-08-29,30

So what happened?

- Commits

  r2450: one line whitespace fix in amforth-shell.py (2020-08-04)
         https://sourceforge.net/p/amforth/code/2450/

  r2451: one line python2->3 fix provided by Tristan Williams. Thanks!
         https://sourceforge.net/p/amforth/code/2451/


- Progress

  - I did some code archeology about how to create an official
    release. see separate email
    https://sourceforge.net/p/amforth/mailman/message/37096517/

  - some more digging on how to create all the .hex files (point 4)
    https://sourceforge.net/p/amforth/mailman/message/37097180/

  - turns out that installing the toolchains is not difficult (on Debian)
    : apt install binutils-riscv64-linux-gnu binutils-arm-linux-gnueabi binutils-arm-none-eabi
    and naken_asm I still had around in some obscure directory.

    After that all the remaining hex files could be built.
    ONLY arduino/leonardo.hex is missing.
    Not bad for a rainy afternoon :-)

  While working on this, sourceforge went into "disaster recovery
  mode" --- not for the first time. :/

  So, this weekend was not as busy from the point of this project, I
  think. However, I spent countless hours in the past weeks to find a
  bug in my data collection system. It makes the communication die for
  no apparent reason, but it still has evaded my attempts to uncover
  it. Such is life.


- Open Issues

  as far as I'm aware:

  - WDT (Martin Nicholas) patch

    Martin has provided a small patch (.asm) regarding the
    startup of the WDT (watch dog timer) on atmega2560
    controllers. I have honestly no idea, whether or not this
    will break something else, and under which conditions exactly
    this is needed.
    link to email archive (Martin Nicholas, June 2019)
    https://sourceforge.net/p/amforth/mailman/message/36682958/

  - Multitasker documentation

    This needs to be tested and enhanced in a few ways. It might
    be that the current example in the Cookbook section is simply
    broken. There have been questions about how to better
    populate the task local user area. Maybe this could be
    answered by a more complex example. There has been the
    question about producing output from a task (not the cmd
    loop), its collision with the shared HLD/TAB area, and
    possible ways to solve this (semaphores, task local HLD/TAB).
    link to email archive (Jan Kromhout Feb 2019)
    https://sourceforge.net/p/amforth/mailman/message/36596842/

  - " du< " is missing
    link to email archive (Martin Nicholas August 2019)
    https://sourceforge.net/p/amforth/mailman/message/36748496/



- AmForth Weekend 4

  Shall take place in October, I think, but I hesitate to fix a date.


Thank you very much for your precious time!

Take care and happy hacking,

Erich

-- 
May the Forth be with you ...