Plans (was [bug #61626] jtagmkii_pdi improvements for jtag2updi use)

[Joerg Wunsch]

As mcudude wrote:

> Is the current plan to apply patches and fix critical bugs and call it a day
> (and that's totally OK), or will further development continue in the future,
> perhaps driven by bug reports, feature requests and user-applied patches?
> Regardless, I'm very thankful for all your contributions over the the years,
> resulting in a tool that's used by the entire AVR community to this very day.

Originally, I had the plan to fix all bugs clearly reported, and apply
all patches that appear clean and useful.

I have given up on that as I had to realize it will defer a release
indefinitely. However, a new release is long overdue.

So, being faced with that, I've been walking through all patches. I
applied all those that seemed useful, well-described, and do not
appear to cause a risk of breaking something else. I think I'm mostly
through with that.

About bug reports, I'm still willing to look at all those that are
either obvious to fix, easy and isolated (so impose not much risk), or
fatal/urgent enough. I'm not yet through with that, but think will
finish that within a reasonable timeframe.

Then, release 6.4 can finally happen. I'm already a little over my
originally intended schedule, but for sure promise a release within
2021.

There will certainly be further development, as needed. We've just
seen two people volunteering for certain improvements, Dawid for
native uPDI, and Marius for native Windows support. Other things will
happen as they seem fit, and there's substantial interest (or man
power) behind.

My personal plan though, after releasing AVRDUDE 6.4 is to finally
also spend some time into avr-libc. There are many (and important)
changes pending as well, so it deserves my share of time.

-- 
cheers, Joerg               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

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