Re: [Tinyos-2.0wg] Re: [nescc-devel] Upgrade

[Eric W. <ewe...@cs...>]

David Gay wrote:


> Note that this doesn't directly address two of the major issues which
> led us to doing our own distribution:
> - consistency of tool versions across supported platforms
> - stability of particular tool versions
> 
> As an example: the avr-gcc 3.4.5 in WinAVR doesn't appear to work for
> TinyOS: the example app I compiled w/ mingw crashes after a little
> while, but works fine with avr-gcc 3.4.3 on my Linux-based system - I
> haven't confirmed that this is due to avr-gcc, but it appears like the
> most likely first hypothesis...

This is why I would prefer that NesC/TinyOS can work with standard 
distributions:

- There is a known major compiler bug in avr-gcc 3.4.5. There is also a 
patch for it. This is now fixed in the latest release of WinAVR which 
has avr-gcc 3.4.6. Alernatively, you should be able to use a previous 
release of WinAVR that has avr-gcc 3.4.3, because WinAVR is hosted on 
SF, so anyone has access to older versions.

- If you use standard avr-gcc distributions, then you no longer have to 
maintain your own separate distribution just for NesC/TinyOS. You can 
leverage other Open Source projects and other people's work. The 
end-user has the best advantage because they can use the same toolchain 
to build a regular AVR application (with WinAVR only), or they can 
easily switch to a NesC/TinyOS toolchain because WinAVR is already a 
subset of that toolchain.

There are already quite a number of users of WinAVR. If you make 
NesC/TinyOS more readily available to these *Windows* users, then you 
will end up with more people trying out these tools and possibly migrate 
to these solutions. This helps the entire community.

-- 
Eric Weddington