[Xc3sprog-users] About the D2XX library and other things

[Joris v. R. <jo...@sr...>]

Hi Uwe,

Thanks again for your excellent work on XC3SPROG.
I just upgraded to SVN r632, and I'd like to make a few comments.

There seems to be no way to make xc3sprog read a custom cablelist.txt
file at run time. I think this is unintentional, so I filed a bug report
in the SF tracker.

Xc3sprog now requires the FTDI D2XX library in order to compile. It
used to be a compile-time option. I think it is very unpractical for a
free software project to have a hard dependency on a closed-source
library. Especially since libD2XX does not seem to offer any advantage
over libftdi.

Would you consider making the use of D2XX optional again? For my own
purpose, I have put the "#ifdef USE_FTD2XX" conditionals back in place
so that I can compile without D2XX. I can send you the diff if you like.

If you are only concerned about the ifdef-mess in the source code, I
am willing to do some cleanup work. I believe the choice between
D2XX/libftdi can be isolated in a very small part of ioftdi.cpp.

Lastly, my feeling is that the built-in help message of xc3sprog has
become a little less user friendly over the last year. In particular,
the "-p" option is not mentioned. I consider myself an experienced user
of xc3sprog, yet I had to look in the source code to figure out how to
run it.

Greetings, Joris van Rantwijk.