Re: [avr-gcc-list] strange behaviour with ceil()

[Joerg Wunsch]

"E. Weddington" <address@hidden> wrote:

> When migrating to AVR GCC from another compiler (like I have
> recently), how / where is one supposed to find out that the
> standard C math routines are in a seperate library file?

That's a FAQ (not only for AVR-GCC but for Unix newbie programmers as
well), the same like the typical question about a missing `volatile'
variable declaration.

So basically, we probably need a FAQ that is referenced from all
locations where one could obtain AVR-GCC from.

OK, the requirement for having a libm.a separate from libc.a is
rather a Unix historical artifact, and one could argue that both could
easily be incorporated into a single libc.a as well...

> I applaud AVR Freaks for trying to make the compiler easy to install
> and use (it worked for me at any rate), but a little more
> documentation would help.

To be honest, i always found the AVR Freaks Makefile templates overly
complicated.  In some respects, it's even dangerous in that it
encourages people to employ a bad Makefile style that is at the risk
of becoming buggy, like with their variable name indentation to
right-align them at the equal sign: you /must/ use spaces to indent
them, if you use a TAB, Makefile syntax mandates that a TAB is
introducing a shell command, and some implementations will simply
complain about it.  So it would be better to simply start all variable
names flush left.

My typical AVR project Makefile doesn't have more than 50 lines, where
i copy about half of it as a `template' from another old project, and
modify the remainder for the actual filenames in my new project.  But
then, i come from a Unix background, so compiler flags and arguments
as well as the use of `make' is quite common to me.

However, the risk of those large template buildings is that you never
really learn how `make' is working, and are at the end of your road as
soon as you encounter a situation which is not covered by the
template.  So i'd rather encourage people to not only study the
compiler documentation, but that of `make' as well.  (Of course, i
have no clue whether the texinfo documentation of gcc and make is
actually included and easily readable in the Windows distributions.)

-- 
J"org Wunsch                                           Unix support engineer
address@hidden        http://www.interface-systems.de/~j/
avr-gcc-list at http://avr1.org