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

[Colin O'Flynn]

Hello,

> 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 agree - I have myself ran into this problem. I'd previously e-mailed the 
list about a suggested change but got no feedback and eventually forgot about 
it. I've attached the message afterwards, if you think what I suggest is 
reasonable I'll go ahead and write a patch to do so.

Regards,

 -Colin


Hello,

I had a proposal about changing the safemode default behaviour.

Instead of automatically changing the fuses, perhaps it should ask if it 
should revert the fuses.

The reason I mention this is I had a VERY sketchy programming setup, very 
unreliable. However safemode read the fuses at the beginning of the run, and 
all times they got reported as 0x00. At the end of the program attempt they 
worked again, and read as their real values. But then they got changed to 
0x00..

As soon as I saw safemode report that the fuses were read as 0x00 I new I was 
screwed, as it is fairly easy to see that 0x00 is not a valid read pattern. 
So if the user was asked what to do it could let them figure out that the 
fuses shouldn't be changed. I guess I really have no one to blame but myself 
for not using that behaviour originally, I just didn't think of it ;-)

Then there could be an option to not ask at all, and just change them back for 
batch files.

Regards,

 -Colin