Re: Binutils on arm : pls advice me how to proceed

[Pedro Alves <pedro_alves at portugalmail dot pt>]

Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 07:55:07PM +0200, Danny Backx wrote:
>   
> > Pedro Alves and I sent some message on the list that indicate where we
> > think some of the problem areas are.
> >
> > Clearly, something must be wrong with those messages, as there appears
> > to be little attention being payed to them.
> >
> > Can someone help me by telling me what I'm missing ?
> > Am I sending the wrong information ?
> > Am I talking to the wrong public ?
> > Am I boring and should I just shut up ? :-)
> >     
>
> The maintainers are always busy; it sometimes takes a long time and a
> couple of tries to get a response.  Patience is very important.
>   
I'm patient. :)
> Fixes for WinCE don't normally get a lot of attention, because there's
> a relatively small user base.
>
>   
Yes, I hope that the cegcc project can grow into "the" toolchain for 
wince development with
gnu tools. When I started using arm-wince-* tools, the thing that almost 
kept me off, was the fact that
the user base was so disperse. Some patches here and there, a few other 
places with prebuilt toolchains,
but no central identity, like say, cygwin or mingw.  Well, actually not 
quite true, there was/is GNUWINCE from
Voxware, but at the time I thought it was a dead project.

> FWIW, I skimmed some of the patches that have been sent; #ifdefs
> are rarely OK.  Although some are probably needed since the WinCE
> loader is so different from typical ARM loaders, it's important to
> minimize them, and to figure out (A) what the differences are supposed
> to be, and (B) where the most effective place to implement the changes
> is.  
I have to admit, I don't yet get the full picture of my own changes. I 
based my work on making the head version of binutils
generate the same objects and images as the old (as in one year and a 
half ago) did. I am sure some (as in most) #ifdefs there are in the 
wrong place,
but to my limited knowledge they were the best place I could find that 
would have minimum code changes.
I would love to hear some directions of how to clean them up.

> Another thing that helps to make your changes clear is new
> testcases; if there had been enough testcases for the special WinCE
> needs, it probably wouldn't have broken.
>
>   

Cheers,
Pedro Alves