[avrdude-dev] BETA Release is now available - please test (was: Good news: STK500v2 and JTAG ICE mkII code committed to CVS)

[Brian Dean]

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 11:15:16PM +0200, Joerg Wunsch wrote:

> Would you find the time to roll that release?  In that case, I'd
> rather leave tagging to you, as the tags should fit into the release
> process.

OK, I've rolled the release.  It is 5.0-BETA and can now be downloaded
from savannah.  The file is:

     avrdude-5.0-BETA.tar.gz             14-May-2005 18:09   419k

I bumped the major version number to version 5 because I view the
addition of JTAG support as a major enhancement, worthy of the bump.
The STK500v2 protocol support is also quite important.

Regarding the "BETA" - we need get more exposure with these changes
before we lift the BETA tag, not only exercising the new features but
also ensuring that we don't have any regressions.  Also, there are
several things that I think we need to address before we release.

I think there is some trepidation with the "safe-mode" fuse bit
changes.  We have several reports of it erroneously changing fuses on
exit because of a bad read of fuses on startup - I got bitten by this
myself.  I think we might want to disable safe-mode by default for
this release until we work through it more and get more comfortable
with it and prehaps re-enable it next release.  I'm open to
suggestions here.  Of course, it's bad when someone accidentally
changes their fuse bits, but we will take some real heat if we mess up
peoples' fuse bits without asking.

Another item is that the latest Mac OS X Tiger ships with GCC 4.0.0.
This compiler is giving out quite a few warnings which didn't trip on
GCC 3.  I'm hoping we can eliminate most if not all of the warnings.
I've attached the full warning list.

Also, it'd be great if we could clear the bug list from savannah
before release.  Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
BDMICRO - ATmega128 Based MAVRIC Controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/

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