[ECOS] Re: CVS access to ecosSWtools-...

[Bart Veer <bartv@cygnus.co.uk>]

>>>>> "Patrick" == Patrick O'Grady <patrick@plasticgrape.com> writes:

    Patrick> Hi, all--is there anonymous CVS access to ecosSWtools-*?
    Patrick> I'm guessing that the ARM tool updates have been
    Patrick> integrated with the other processors, and since I'm using
    Patrick> both the ARM and the i386 tools, ideally I could get the
    Patrick> current version which has support for both... TIA.

The ecosSWtools downloads are basically snapshots of a number of
different packages, primarily gcc, gdb, and binutils. These snapshots
have been tested for the main targets of interest and are known to be
pretty solid. They are also becoming dated, there have been lots of
developments such as new compiler optimizations which are not
available in these tarballs. However producing these snapshots takes
quite a bit of time, and the eCos team at Cygnus would prefer to spend
this time on eCos itself rather than on the tools.

Instead it should be possible to take the latest releases of gcc, gdb
and binutils and combine these to give an up to date toolchain. All of
these are available from sourceware.cygnus.com, alongside eCos. The
latest releases of gcc (2.95.1) and gdb (4.18) should be mostly ok for
most targets. People can use later snapshot releases or anoncvs if
desired. The most recent binutils release was in May 1998 and does not
contain some features such as selective linking. Instead it would be
necessary to use a later snapshot, and we need to figure out which is
the most appropriate (or whether different snapshots might be
necessary for different targets).

Actually combining the different tools to produce a complete toolchain
is not quite as simple as it could be. There is some documentation out
there in e.g. the crossgcc faq, but it could be improved. There are
plans to write appropriate documentation for eCos users, try things
out for a couple of targets, and then let people experiment with the
other targets. In due course we should be able to retire the
ecosSWtools completely.

Bart Veer // eCos net maintainer