Re: [avr-chat] Can't Install avr-gcc in FreeBSD

[Joerg Wunsch]

David Brown <address@hidden> wrote:

> The msp430 port of gcc, as an example, is a perfectly solid port of
> gcc (albeit somewhat out of date), but installation on Linux, last I
> checked, involves getting the gcc source tarballs, then patching
> based on the cvs versions of the msp430 patches.

That's due to their disconnected development.  I never really
understood why they did not integrate the MSP430 port into the regular
GCC source tree but maintain it outside.  Supposedly, there are a few
more GCC targets operated that way.

> There are certainly plenty of things that are easier to work with in
> *nix, although I haven't found doxygen to be a problem under windows
> (I haven't tried running the avrlibc source through it).

It's not doxygen itself, but the generated documentation requires all
sorts of other things, not only LaTeX but also dot and thus Qt.

> The real pain is often cygwin and it's assorted dll conflicts - ...

Right.  It eventually boils down to the Win32 API not offering an
option for a thoroughly backwards compatible shared library versioning
scheme, something not only Cygwin suffers from but also many Windows
applications.  Strange enough, Windows users appear to tolerate that
design flaw as God-given, but then complain about how cumbersome *nix
systems are to use. ;-)

> I haven't tried FreeBSD ports, but I gather it is similar to Gentoo's 
> system - ...

Guess where Gentoo has inherited its Portage from. ;-)

In FreeBSD, a "port" is the "recipe" you're mentioning, and a package
is the binary package compiled out of it, which includes all
dependency information so the installer can automatically install the
dependencies.  In effect, that's the same as WinAVR is offering to a
Windows user, except you've got a finer level of control about what to
install.  So for example, you can opt to install just avr-libc and
avr-gcc (which will require avr-binutils), but leave out avr-gdb,
Insight and everything else that ships bundled with WinAVR.

If someone would really believe a FreeBSD-AVR port would make sense,
it could be set up as a meta port installing everything related to the
AVR, including the kitchensink (usually called a "meta port").  That
would be the FreeBSD equivalent of WinAVR.  So far, nobody requested
this though.  Ports like this one exist for suites like Xorg
(everything related to the X.org X11 distribution), or Gnome and KDE.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)