Re: [avrdude-dev] Re: About avrdude-gui

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Henrik Brix Andersen wrote:

> May I suggest making a shared library (libavrdude) instead, then
> external projects (fltk-avrdude, gavrdude, kavrdude, ...) can link
> against that library to provide a GUI for avrdude.

I don't think that makes any sense, for the following reasons.

. You could already start using the current project, and consider its
  .o files a library (though it's not a .a file).  They could be
  organized a bit better (e.g. in some subdirectories), no argument
  here, but that shouldn't hinder you starting your project.

. A *shared* library only makes sense if there's something to share at
  all.  The point is not whether some .o files could be shared, but
  whether more than one application will use it by the same time.
  That's very likely not the case.  But then, there's no point in
  making a shared library (other than it appears to be popular these
  days).  It will only increase maintenance effort (regardless of how
  little it might be using some fancy tool, compared to zero, it will
  always be more), and the PIC requirements will produce poorer code
  in particular on architectures like the i386 with its permanent lack
  of free registers available to the compiler.

. Finally, there's no point in wasting developer's resources by
  starting more than one GUI project at the same time.  Sure, it might
  make sense to start skeletons of each, just to be able to compare
  them, but after that, gentlemen, please discuss the pros and cons,
  and agree on a single approach but do it well instead.


As Bernard Fouché wrote:

> As for a command-line only or a gui-version, I'd prefer to have 2
> executables, one GUI and one CLI, at least to be able to
> compile/link avrdude on a computer without having to install tens of
> different packages (pango/wxdigets/gtk2, etc).

configure should be able to take care of that.  My idea is that by
default, no GUI should be configured, in the same light as no
(texinfo-based) documentation is built by default: to keep the number
of prerequisites minimal.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)