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

[David Gay]

On 5/11/06, Eric Weddington <eweddington at cso.atmel.com> wrote:
> 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." ;-)

Actually you want the other one: "emacs is an editor, not a
programming language" ;-)

> 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...

I should've been clearer: you need emacs if you're building from CVS.
The release tarballs include the generated files (as is common for
many other projects).
> > - The TinyOS make-based build system didn't seem very happy
>
> Why wasn't it happy?

I don't know, I didn't investigate.

> > - 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>

That's what we're already distributing w/ TinyOS.

> > 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...

So would I, but I don't have an army of slaves at my command ;-)

> 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.

Note that this doesn't directly address two of the major issues which
led us to doing our own distribution:
- consistency of tool versions across supported platforms
- stability of particular tool versions

As an example: the avr-gcc 3.4.5 in WinAVR doesn't appear to work for
TinyOS: the example app I compiled w/ mingw crashes after a little
while, but works fine with avr-gcc 3.4.3 on my Linux-based system - I
haven't confirmed that this is due to avr-gcc, but it appears like the
most likely first hypothesis...

David Gay