Re: [PATCH 4/5] gnu: Add avr-toolchain.

[Thompson, David]

Reviving this old thread.

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 1:33 PM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> David Thompson <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> * gnu/packages/avr.scm (avr-toolchain): New variable.
>
> I’m guessing that the goal is to allow users to install it in a profile
> and build stuff interactively from there, right?
>
> However, profiles currently contain only native packages; patch #2 moves
> ’search-paths’ to ‘native-search-paths’, which in part is a way to work
> around this limitation.
>
> I think a better solution would be to allow users to build profiles that
> contain non-native packages.  That way, we could do things like:
>
>   guix environment --target=avr foo
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Until this is possible, we could apply this patch with the added
> search-paths/native-search-paths hack (assuming said hack has been
> removed from patch #2.)
>
> Does it makes sense?

We discussed this on IRC quite awhile back, and the conclusion was
that this didn't make sense because compiling for AVR isn't like
compiling for an architecture like x86 or MIPS because you cannot
actually run any "normal" software on an AVR.  They are very
special-purpose, 8-bit processors with a limited amount of resources
and can not run GNU/Linux.  Thus, the only way that one would want to
use avr-gcc is to have it compiled for their workstation's
architecture so that they can cross-compile AVR firmware.

I think the native-search-paths make sense for this use-case.  With
this toolchain I've once again been able to build the firmware for my
arcade stick.

Without further ado, I will push this.

- Dave