[Tinyos-devel] Re: [Tinyos-2.0wg] Re: [nescc-devel] Upgrade

[Eric Weddington]

David Gay wrote:
> Some news on the nesC/mingw front: I've checked in (to nesC's
> sourceforge repository) a version which seems to work under mingw
> (I've seen a small problem with the nesdoc tool so far, I'll look into
> it next week) with WinAVR. Also, the nesC frontend for TinyOS (ncc&co)
> in tinyos-2.x/tools/tinyos/ncc seems happy too.
> 
> Some notes:
> - building nesC requires running emacs from the command line - I just
> ran make under cygwin and pressed ^C once those steps were done ;-) If
> there's a msys/mingw-based emacs around, that should work (probably
> the regular emacs for windows will work too, or adding cygwin's emacs
> to msys's path).

Repeat after me: "emacs is an editor, not an operating system." ;-)

There is very probably NOT a msys/mingw-based emacs around. Could you 
explain more about why you need emacs to build the toolchain? Most other 
open source projects usually require a "configure;make;make install" 
sequence in the shell...


> - nesC requires the patched avr assembler - I compiled TinyOS's
> distrubution of avr-binutils under mingw, and just installed the
> assembler over the WinAVR one.
> - I used the latest ActiveState perl
> - I investigated making executables from perl - this seems to require
> paying money (*)
> - installing the tools in tinyos-2.x/tools/tinyos/ncc requires python
> to be around (though it will only be needed if running nesdoc on
> TinyOS 2.x programs)
> - The TinyOS make-based build system didn't seem very happy

Why wasn't it happy? Is it because it is using absolute Unix-style 
pathnames? That would make it break for a mingw-based (i.e. Windows 
based) file system. If this is the case, can it be changed to use 
relative pathnames?

> - using nesdoc for TinyOS 1.x requires dot (from AT&T), for TinyOS 2.x
> it requires dot and python

dot can be found in the Graphviz package, which there is a download 
available for Windows:
<http://www.graphviz.org/Download..php>


> At this point (apart from fixing the nesdoc issue mentioned above),
> I'm going to wait for more feedback from those (who apart from Eric?
> Martin?) who want to produce the mingw-based distribution before doing
> much more...

I would hope that there would be more than just us...

Thank you very much for doing this! I hope that we can converge in the 
future and have a cross-platform NesC/TinyOS toolchain, based on 
standard distributions of the AVR toolchain.

-- 
Eric Weddington