RE: [avrdude-dev] winxp lpt device autodetect

[Alex Shepherd]

Hi Brian/Eric.

> > Alex, if you have the time and inclination, a patch to the
> > source would be most helpful to have! It would make
> > incorporating the changes that much easier. TIA.

Please give me a few clues how I would go about doing this. I believe this
is done using "diff" utility and you select the context diff option with
maybe 4 lines of context. Bear in mind that I an starting from the source
code tar file and not CVS so I guess I need to unzip the file again to
another directory and diff the two directories. Is this what you want?

> I seem to recall, as part of the changes, a patch that disabled the
> numeric address progress indicator and replaced it with '.'s being
> printed for each 128 bytes?  That change seemed a bit gratuitous,
> though, and we've been printing the rolling address for many years
> now, so I'd like to keep that part working the way it is.

Well if you are using avrdude on the command line then it is probably fine,
but when you run avrdude inside an IDE (I bet you use VI or Emacs right)
that captures the output, you end up with a screen full of hundreds of lines
of numbers and you have to scroll around inside the window to find the
relevant success or failure message. This makes the use of avrdude in this
environment rather painful.

The main reason I have persevered with avrdude is that it comes bundled with
WinAvr. (thanks Eric) It makes sense to have a programming utility that
works reliably with Windows, so new people wanting to work on my project,
only need to install the WinAvr package and they are ready to go.

You sound quite set on keeping the current numeric progress behaviour which
is fine, so may I suggest that we add an alternate hashing type progress
indicator much like what uisp and ftp etc use. This new parameter could be
of the form --hash[=nn] where if "--hash" is specified then it prints a hash
rather than the current numeric progress indicator that defaults to some
useful number like 256 say which can be changed by specifying the optional
[=nn].

Cheers

Alex