[Tinyos Core WG] toolchain rationale

[Jan Beutel]

On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 09:20 -0800, David Gay wrote:
> 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 ;-))

this is a snippet from boomerangs ncc where the absolute TOSDIR was
removed by an environment test. something similar needs to be done in
nescc-mig 

# Configuration
#$TOSDIR = "/opt/tinyos-2.x/tos";
$TOSDIR = $ENV{"TOSDIR"} if defined($ENV{"TOSDIR"});
$nescc = "/opt/moteiv/usr/bin/nescc";
$tossim = 0;

# Support platform directory renaming for 2.x
if (-d "$TOSDIR/platform") {
    $platform = "platform";
}
else {
    $platform = "platforms";

i am on my way to figure out all these problems but i guess that it will
be hard to do a "clean" relocatable tools release in a binary form
(win/linux) that works for all.

first i will give it a try to compile all from
http://www.tinyos.net/dist-2.0.0/tools/source/
using one script and one prefix.... then we can see from there...

jb




-- 
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