[Tinyos-devel] heads up -- users of TinyOS 2.x CVS head need to reinstall ncc

[John Regehr]

I was hoping to wait until Safe TinyOS was a bit more fleshed out before 
sending this mail, but as Romain's message indicates, I should have sent 
it before now.

As of last Friday, people using TinyOS 2.x from CVS need to upgrade to 
the latest ncc, which is done by running "make install" in 
$TOSROOT/tools/tinyos/ncc, after running the Bootstrap and configure 
(with appropriate --prefix) scripts in $TOSROOT/tools.  The new ncc is 
not found in any binary tool distribution (it will be in 2.1).  The new 
ncc is needed in order to ignore the Safe TinyOS annotations that are 
now starting to appear in the code.

The rest of this mail is intended for people who are interested in Safe 
TinyOS.

The annotations that we are committing look like SINGLE, NONNULL, 
COUNT(n), etc.  Before 2.1 is released we plan to change these macros 
into corresponding nesC attributes @single(), @nonnull(), @count(n), 
etc., which will break back-compatibility and thus require nesC 1.3. 
The other major change will be to move interface annotations out of the 
function prototypes and into special nesdoc comments.

The current set of installation instructions for Safe TinyOS can be 
found here:

   http://www.cs.utah.edu/~coop/safetinyos/

Note that Safe TinyOS is not yet ready for general usage.  Not enough 
annotations have been committed for most applications to execute in safe 
mode.

For now we are not setting up a mailing list for Safe TinyOS, though we 
may do so later.  This list is a good place to discuss it.

John Regehr