Hi, I've already embarrassed myself on this list with my early naive questions, as I battle to migrate from PIC to AVR, and I guess I'm going to embarrass myself again.
What I want to ask is - what's the current thinking within the avr-gcc community with respect to documentation, and the task of making avr-gcc approachable to newcomers? Is good newbie-friendly documentation seen as a valued goal within the community? Before I start, I do have to express my deepest appreciation for the marvellous job at code level that has gone into avr-gcc and avr-libc, and for the time and effort donated by its umpteen developers. It is absolutely wonderful to have the much-cherished gcc toolchain available and working so brilliantly for AVR. But - I've been having a hard time with learning avr-gcc, largely due to the way the documentation (or lack of it) is organised. To give some examples: - avr-as pseudo-ops - there seems to be no thorough list of these. For example, I had to look through list archives to learn how to declare a buffer in SRAM via the '.skip' pseudo-op - a good part of the C API is well documented via doxygen, but there is no consolidated global index of everything. Such an index would prove a huge boost - there's no definitive list of assembler macros - I can count the code examples on my left hand. There really need to be several dozen examples shipped in /doc/examples in the avr-libc distribution, ranging from the simplest to the more complex To give an example of great microcontroller compiler doco, consider the PIC CCS C compiler manual: http://www.ccsinfo.com/downloads/ccs_c_manual.pdf That, together with the extensive examples, flatten the learning curve to a mild uphill stroll. If the CCS compiler was free/opensource, or if there was a really decent free/opensource C compiler for PIC (sdcc is not that good), I'd probably be staying with PIC. I'm sure I'll be ok with avr-gcc and avr-libc once I've got a good grasp of things. But it does seem that: avr-gcc doco = avr-libc site docs + avr-gcc list archives + avr-gcc and avr-libc source code I've seen this situation often - developers can often feel that writing doco that caters to newbies is beneath them. But this can repel a lot of people, which might be a big part of why PIC, PICAXE and BASIC STAMP, with their excellent doco, continue to enjoy huge market share despite their vastly inferior and often much more expensive products. Cheers David _______________________________________________ AVR-GCC-list mailing list AVR-GCC-list@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-gcc-list