[Tinyos Core WG] toolchain rationale

[David Gay]

On 11/16/06, Jan Beutel <j.beutel at ieee.org> wrote:
> 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?

Two major rationales:
- No desire to constantly track the latest releases (it does take
effort to do this)
- Many past instances where particular versions do not work well
enough to be used for TinyOS

These work together, i.e., the 2nd problem means that blindly tracking
releases is a bad idea, so you have to spend more time whenever you
decide to update.

> 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...)

FWIW, the usual Unix-style tool build process is not friendly to
relocating packages (just try relocating your typical Linux package).
While this is always fixable w/ enough effort, it doesn't seem
particularly worthwhile (and often comes at the cost of other
problems, e.g., dependencies on environment variable settings). We
have, in the past at least, tried to make it possible to relocate the
tinyos package itself.

And while I'm on the topic of supporting tools: I am no longer in the
business of building and testing them. So if you, or anybody else,
wants to take over that task and fix these various issues, I'm sure
everybody will be happy :-) (especially as time passes and the current
tools become more obsolete).

David Gay