Andrew E. Kalman wrote:
From our perspective of supporting Salvo, this is the major "gotcha"
with gcc-based tools vs. the commercial IDEs/compilers -- with the
commercial ones, there is just one toolset, and so everything is very
well-defined in terms of what needs to be done to incorporate that
compiler into the Salvo distribution. With gcc-???, there are lots of
"preferred" environments, and we can / will only support one because of
the time and expense involved in testing, maintenance, etc.
it's not that bad. with gcc you usualy use makefiles, most IDEs that
build on gcc actualy use makefiles behind the scenes.
it's true that you can call a command line compiler with what you want,
by hand, make, ant, and all the other build systems...
but most source distributions (with c code) work with make.
on un*x system it's common to have an archive (tar.gz / .tgz) that
extracts to a folder, then in that folder, one runs "./configure"
"make" and "make install"
"configure" detects the environment and checks the compiler, etc. it
also accepts options from the user. this is usualy not needed for msp430
project as there is no such infrastructure like on a normal PC.
"make" builds the executable(s)
"make install" does not make sense as the host computer can not run
msp430 code... but it probably makes sense to have a "make download".
i do have such a target in most of my makefiles.
that means if you provide your software with a makefile, it can be used
by almost all users. it's what they get installed along with mspgcc on
Win32 and un*x users have it anyway. also, all our examples come with
makefiles.
chris
