Re: [avrdude-dev] configuration file generation

[Joerg Wunsch]

As jo wrote:

> As I understand it, Atmel's avr-studio (never used it) works with xml 
> file to store each chip configuration and it would be usefull to have 
> something to convert them to avrdude's configuration file.

If you look into the tools/ subdirectory of AVRDUDE, you can already
find some XSL "stylesheets" that extract parameters for certain
snippets.  Some of the parametes avrdude.conf is currently using (like
everything about the actual ISP programming commands) are not present
in the Atmel XML files though, as this is inherent knowledge of Atmel
tools' firmware.  However, while avrdude.conf assumes this information
must be provided on a per-device basis, the Atmel tools demonstrate
this knowledge could be implemented in a general way, so it could be
left out of the configuration file completely.

Alas, changing all this is a little more than a weekend's worth of
work.

> So I'm willing to help by trying to code this tool. I just need somme of 
> this xml file.

Atmel doesn't allow these XML files to be distributed outside of their
AVR Studio tool.  Thus, you have to get your own copy of them through
AVR Studio.

Ideally, when someone really wants to touch this, the current way of
how avrdude.conf works should be questioned.  The current avrdude.conf
is about half a megabyte, which is fairly hard to handle.  At least
for the source itself (i.e. the files that live in the avrdude source
tree), it would be nice to have one file (snippet) per device, and
another one per programmer.  I don't want to claim XML were the
all-singing all-dancing solution for everything, but the current "flat
file" solution has shown its deficiencies during the past decade, with
all its "stabdelay", "hventerstabdelay", "hvleavestabdelay" etc.
parameters, so I wouldn't mind converting it into some kind of
hierachical structure if it's about to be touched anyway.

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

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