[Tinyos Core WG] toolchain rationale

[Jan Beutel]

hello all,

i wanted to know about the rationale behind the build toolchain assumed
for tos2. is there any thought process behind the currently assumed
version numbers, e.g. avr-libc 1.2.3 other than "individual likings"?
e.g. one version behind the current toplevel release?

the reason i am asking is that i have not been a friend of the many
steps involved in getting TOS going, let alone the chance of a windows
installation surviving a simultaneous "clean" tos2 environment and for
example boomerang 2.0.3 and 2.04 on the same machine. i know this is not
the common case... and most people will be happy with the original 1.x
one click windows installer and possibly some extra rpms. 

moreover, there are people that want/have to install in other
directories than /opt and /usr and this currently involved patching up
ncc and nescc everytime there is a new tool release. not very difficult,
but nasty. (e.g. on a department-wide cluster of workstations used for
student activities...)

ah and i read about the unfortunate vlado and his eyezfx platform bug
thing the other day and myself i was thinking  for a while of launching
a tos cruisecontrol build and possibly some tests (e.g. java unit
testing). but this required me to "handinstall" the tools/env onto our
compute servers here without root access - and lead to this email.
-frustration- after an hour of fiddling!

for those curious, here is a link to our cruisecontrol server:

http://tik42x.ee.ethz.ch:8080


here some experience from another project:

my rationale for tools for BTnut has been to follow the current toplevel
WinAVR toolchain and the install of a new pc works: (1) single
command/click install of winavr/linux_avr and (2) unpack the BTnut
sources. both works to install into custom directories. - this has been
simple and effective.

currently winavr comes with: GNU Binutils 2.16, GCC 3.4.5, AVR Libc
1.4.3, uisp [20050207] and AVRDUDE 5.1 


best,

jb


ps. what's the status of nesc? is there a maintainer?

ps. and phil, yes, this means i will reactivate my energy for the
btnode3 platform port ;-)

-- 
Dr. Jan Beutel                              j.beutel at ieee.org
Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, ETZ G75
ETH Zurich                             +41 44 632 70 32 Phone
Gloriastrasse 35                         +41 44 632 10 35 Fax
CH 8092 Zurich/Switzerland  http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~beutel