Re: [avrdude-dev] Initial STK600 support committed to CVS

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Bob Paddock wrote:

> In the GUI there is a button that causes a read of all the XML
> files in a passed directory location, and builds the device.conf
> file.  You only use it when you get new Studio XML files,
> as it is not a fast process.

> I can make this a standalone program if that helps.

Alas, not very much.  What we really need is some conversion from the
Atmel XML to our own XML.  We are not allowed to store the Atmel XML
documents anywhere in a public CVS repository, so the only way is to
convert them, i. e. to extract the information out of them we need.

The original yacc/lex-based configuration file parser was certainly a
good idea by its time (I actually hinted Brian Dean to start it,
rather than hard-coding the configuration into the binary), but
AVRDUDE has simply outgrown its capabilities these days.  There are
now things like "chiperasepolltimeout", "programfusepolltimeout",
"programlockpolltimeout".  A hierarchical configuration would help
untangling this.  As the best available hierarchical format these days
is XML, what we need then is some XML -> XML transformation to get our
own XML files out of the Atmel ones -- which we can store within our
CVS.

For the XML -> XML transformation, I lean towards using XSLT but only
if it doesn't get too much into our way.  Definately, the converter
should become part of the AVRDUDE project.

> It would be better to have one, structured, file that is the
> aggregation of the Studio files, and a second, structured, file that
> contains the rest of the data that AVRDude needs.

Why that?  I'd see the natural choice to have them as subhierarchies
within the same file.

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

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