gnupic: gputils development
Subject:
gputils development
From:
"David Barnett" ####@####.####
Date:
12 Nov 2008 09:16:27 -0000
Message-Id: <4d52f78b0811110924h60cb14kfb51a5311098661d@mail.gmail.com>
It's been my experience that gputils has a steep learning curve for
development, probably more so than the average open source project.
I think the reasons are probably that:
- the source language (C) is fairly low-level
- the project has changed hands several times and never had a large
development team
- the scope (translating PIC assembly) is pretty complicated and not very
exciting on the face of it
I've set up a page on the gputils wiki with some background and a place for
suggestions: http://gputils.wiki.sourceforge.net/FosteringInnovation. Please
feel welcome to freely add/modify, but please keep specific feature-related
discussion in the Feature Request tracker or the FeatureWishlist page (for
more ambitious suggestions).
I'd like to throw out a few questions:
- First, am I making a big deal about nothing? Is gputils' current
development cycle okay, slow pace, dead periods and all?
- Has anyone started to dig through the source code and make changes, but
given up? What might have helped you continue (e.g. specific questions
answered, other developers working in parallel, IRC bug days...)?
- For developers who have contributed big patches (Borut, Michael Ballbach,
Andreas Kabel, many more...), do you have any ideas or experience to share?
- What features added in recent history have been most helpful (new COFF
support, CONFIG directive on PIC18, etc.)?
- Has anyone switched back to MPASM because of a feature missing from
gputils?
I haven't had much energy lately to work on gputils, but I'd like to do
whatever little things I can (answer questions, touch up docs, work closely
with other devs) to help accelerate development.
David
