Re: [Usbpicprog-technical] loading PIC data from Piklab XML files

[Francesco M. <f18...@ya...>]

Hi Frans,

Frans Schreuder ha scritto:
> I am looking through the xml branch you made and it sure looks good!
Thanks!

> (I'm sorry that I couldn't find more time earlier to have a look at it, 
> but I have a lot of other things to do at the moment...)
no problem, really. I was busy on other things too and so the progress was/is 
slow :)

> There's just one thing I am wondering: what have you done to autogen.sh 
> and configure.ac?
I have recently changed my workstation (now I'm on x86_64 linux) and doing so I 
discovered that the usbpicprog configure didn't warn if libusb was missing. I 
fixed it and in the meanwhile I also cleaned it up a bit (mostly organizing it 
in sections and using wx's 'official' M4 macros)...

> It doesn't seem to install the locales anymore, nor does it install the 
> xml files.
ops, fixed copying the install-sh of the trunk.
It should be ok now... let me know if I broke something else :)

> Do you think it is necessary to distribute the xml files with the 
> program?
I think it would be better; unfortunately sometimes there are infos in the 
Piklab XML files which are wrong (at least they look wrong to me but I'm not 
100% sure) and if the user may just edit an XML file to fix upp_wx for his PIC 
model, it would be indeed more happy than being forced to wait for a new 
release/snapshot.

Also, distributing the XML files would encourage the user to complete them with 
the missing info for their favourite PIC models (e.g. many names of pins in the 
<package> tags are missing...).

Btw before releasing an upp_wx version which uses Piklab XML files it would be 
nice to inform Piklab developers of this (and we may periodically post them the 
diffs between our XML files and theirs, so that both projects can converge to a 
correct database of PICs info).

> I think Piklab really compiles the xml files into the program 
> which makes it easier to distribute. 
yes, I realized it after writing the XML loading code.
However I also made upp_wx "smart", in the sense that it loads XML files on 
request (does not load all of them at startup!) and thus is quite fast.

>Do you know if wxWidgets provides 
> something for that?
there is http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Embedding_PNG_Images-Bin2c_In_C ; it's for 
binary files but I think should work ok also for XML files.
But as I said thanks to the load-on-request and given the added advantages of 
having the XML files on the end-user system, I think it's not required.

> I know that loading the xml files at runtime has some advantages, eg 
> that you can edit them without having to recompile the program, but I am 
> sure that it will bring some problems especially when we are talking 
> about cross platform development...
sorry, which problems could it bring?
I'm using XML files in various other (cross-platform, wx-based) projects and I 
never had troubles...

Francesco

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