[Tinyos Core WG] toolchain rationale

[David Gay]

On 11/17/06, Jan Beutel <j.beutel at ieee.org> wrote:
> > 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).
>
> ok david. thanx for the offer. you will hear from me...
>
> basically there are two issues with the current toolchain that make it
> cumbersome to install/move:
>
> - avr-libc has deprecated avr/signal.h in versions > 1.4.x
> - ncc and nescc assume absolute install paths

- We should ensure the T2 tree builds with the latest tools when
possible (the problem is that tends to lead to situations where it
stops working with older tools :-().
- Our tools should, whenever reasonable, work with all extant versions
of tos (e.g., the T2 tools do work for T1, though it does require some
minor patches that are in CVS only, as there hasn't been a T1 minor
release in ages)

Which ncc/nescc absolute paths are the problem? The usual one people
complain about is the TinyOS path, but ncc has several mechanisms for
overriding that (and the alternative "no absolute path" is no better,
as it just means you keep the overriding mechanisms and drop the
default value ;-))

David