AVR Freaks

Soundararajan,

There needs to be a link on the Atmel website where AS5 is downloaded that points to the patches for the AVR Toolchain at that other server.

The link needs to be on this page:

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/product...

With instructions on how to get the associated patches.

This is required to conform to the GPLv3 license. (See section 6(d).)

Also, there has already been discussion online where certain patches to avr-libc 1.7.1 will cause the build of avr-libc to fail. These patches should, ideally, be removed from the patch set.

Eric Weddington
Open Source Community Manager
Atmel

So explain why you think YOU need to build it for Windows? If you want a copy just (once and for all) download and install AS5 then simply excise a copy of the \Program Files\Atmel\AVR Studio 5.0\extenstions\Applications\AVR Toolchain directory tree and you now have a windows hosted copy of avr-gcc

Look, guys, who cares why one wants to build the toolchain for Windows? We're not here to try to decipher why, especially when others are easily available.

If the user wants to build the tools on their own, the avr-libc user manual has instructions on how to do that. Not that it's real easy, mind you.

The fact is that for the avr-gcc, binutils, avr-libc projects you can pull "HEAD" which is the most up to date release version but in each case it will not necessarily have the very latest changes in it. So there are then patches to be applied to those base versions to bring them even further up to date (many developed by Atmel for support of very new AVR models).

So when Atmel built "Toolchain" that is in AS5 then pulled the generic "HEAD" of each project and then applied a set of patches and built the resultant software tree then put the binaries that this produced in the AS5 install package. Which means if you download and install AS5 you have the most up to date avr-gcc/avr-libc/etc. possible. If you just use Windows you need do nothing more and can ignore the .patch files all together.

The issue was that avr-gcc/binutils are published under a license called GPL which makes it a requirement that anyone who uses the resultant binaries MUST be able to rebuild those binaries themselves if they choose. To do that they'd need access to "HEAD" of the trees *AND* the .patch files that were also applied. For almost a month after the release of AS5 Atmel were in violation of that license and did not make the patches they had used available. In this thread they finally announced that they had now made the files public.

All this (on the whole) is of no concern to anyone using AS5 and the AVR Toolchain on a Windows computer as they already have everything built up to date.

The people who were concerned were those of us who use Linux or Mac OSX because without the patches we had no way to build a Linux or Mac based identical copy of the AVR Toolchain in AS5. By publishing these patches Atmel have now opened the possibility for Mac and Linux toolchains to be built that offer the same device support and bug fixes as found in AS5+Toolchain.

If you thought that the patches announced here were something you had to use to update your Windows installed copy of AS5 and "Toolchain" then you have misunderstood. The fact is you already have everything that is delivered by these patches. It's just that the other half of the development world - the ones that Atmel have chosen to ignore - did not until this release (although someone had actually noticed it a couple of days before this thread was created anwyay)