Re: [AVaRICE-user] Avarice file formats

[Nils K. S. <ni...@om...>]

On Sat, 29 Mar 2003, Theodore A. Roth wrote:

I am happy to see this solution fall in taste.

> One thing though. What if bfd is not available on a system? Most gnu
> programs that use bfd (gdb, gcc, etc) ship with bfd included.

Hmm. On RedHat, bfd is made available through the binutils binary package. On
FreeBSD (5) it is not :-(  (I don't have other platforms on hand - these are my
two development platforms).

So your question requires a solution - to keep avarice portable to the
other systems supported today.


From the top of my head, here's some ideas:
  1. Include bfd in avarice CVS
  2. Include bfd in avarice source/binary releases
  3. Link to bfd from avarice home page / documentation

I would go for 1 or 2, IMHO the more available the better. But of course
patches to the bfd library would have to migrate into avarice as well. This is
not a trivial question.

I think it's best if you could look into this question.  I will of course
contribute, but IMHO my knowledge of autoconf and automake is too limited to
take this task myself.


I am thinking of creating other patches, noteably verification of programmed
data, programming/verification of EEPROM, fuses and lock bits.

This would be an addition that make avarice a complete development platform, no
other low-level tools or utilities will be required.

These patches, however, require that the bfd question has been answered.

Regards,
Nils Strom

E-mail:  ni...@om...
Web:     http://www.omegav.ntnu.no/~nilsst

Hardware, n: The part of a computer system that can be kicked
             (Michael Barr)