Bill Traynor wrote: > Maybe I'm being dense, but what's specifically wrong with the current > toolchain universe? Back in ye olde days, you could download GCC and Binutils from gnu.org, configure for whatever is your architecture, and most times it just worked. For some reason, that stopped a while ago, and you had to go to different places to get working basic tools. And often, the place to go wasn't clear. Different people advertised their "ARM toolchain", "m68k toolchain" etc. and they were slightly different sets of patches on top of mainline tools. Central authorities you might believe in existed, but they were always a few patches behind what you actually needed. When I last needed a toolchain, Google led to confusing results, and I had to try more than one. I still use mutiple GCC versions (from different people) to compile different programs for the same architecture: each one fails some things in a different way, including run-time failures in the precompiled toolchains. Just Google for "uclinux toolchain" and the top hits lead to very old releases, with bugs that have long been fixed elsewhere. "uclinux arm toolchain" is no better. Perhaps current versions (e.g. from Codesourcery?) are more dependable for embedded architectures, but I don't have the time to thoroughly test them, and my last experience warns me to be careful. It seems people release tools, release patches, publish on an obscure web page, then forget about the page. More authoritative-sounding uclinux web pages tend to be out of date. Google isn't finding good current authorities in this area, which suggests the space is rather fragmented with people pulling in different directions and not working together enough to create stable, common places for these things. Contrast with kernel.org: everyone knows where to get a good working Linux kernel for the mainstream architectures, and the quality work tends to be quite good at reaching mainline there nowadays. -- Jamie -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
