On 30/10/2012 23:37, Brendan Conoboy wrote: > On 10/26/2012 02:01 AM, Mitnacht, Thomas wrote: >> Hello GCC-enthusiasts! > [snip] > > Hi everybody- I am the engineering project manager of the MSP430 effort > at Red Hat. On behalf of Red Hat and TI we would like to thank the > community, especially Peter Bigot, for his hard work. Additional thanks > to TI for recognizing the importance of MSPGCC and Free/Open Source > software in general. At Red Hat, our team's principal goal is to make > MSP430 an officially supported architecture in gcc, gdb and their > associated support libraries. Having ported and pushed dozens of new > architectures upstream, I can say with confidence that everybody wins > with upstream ports: New features will come to MSP430 with each new > release, bugs get looked at by FSF maintainers, and the community can > diversify its efforts beyond maintaining the compiler tools. In the > coming weeks and months we will become increasingly active in public as > we make progress in the project. Thank you! > >
I fully agree about the benefits of getting msp430 support into the mainline trees for the tools. While there are benefits in having an officially supported (by TI and/or Red Hat) out-of-tree build on the side, everyone wins in having the main work being in-tree. (A typical use of the out-of-tree build would be to apply patches for supporting new devices faster than mainline FSF releases.) One problem you will face in this move is the copyright situation for many contributions to msp430 gcc, binutils, gdb and libraries. As far as I know, everything has always been contributed with suitable licenses (GPL, library licenses, etc.), with the exception of some restricted code for interfacing gdb to msp430 devices that is only available in binary form - but since the code in question is owned by TI, I guess you'll get that sorted out!. However, to get code into FSF trees, you'll need copyright assignments - and I think it will be a challenge to track down all the people involved and get the assignments in place. I believe this has always been one of the main reasons why mspgcc has not been fully merged upstream. I am sure you will get helpful responses if you can get hold of the appropriate people (and posting to this mailing list is probably a good start), but I fear you will have to do a certain amount of re-writing. However, once you have first completed the merge with upstream, it will make maintenance and development far easier in the future. I don't know what mailing lists or other channels you will use for communication during this development (I guess the gcc development list at least), but please keep us up to date on this list too. Anyway, good luck in the project - as you say, everyone will win. mvh., David ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct _______________________________________________ Mspgcc-users mailing list Mspgcc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mspgcc-users
