[En-Nut-Discussion] NutOS configurator

[Harald Kipp]

Ole Reinhardt schrieb:
> Does anyone have better experiences on the linux platform? 
>
> I don't understand whet the problem might be. Is it a lua problem? A
> wxwidgets problem? For me it's quite unusable. The commandline options
> is not far what I need as I have to change options from time to time.
>
> My platform:
>
> debian/unstable
> wxwidgets 2.6
> lua5
>   
Hi Ole,

most of the time I'm still using Windows to build Nut/OS. However, 
several workstations in our company are Debian Edge now and the 
Configurator will be used more often on Linux. As far as I can say, it's 
working acceptable.

Neverthelee, speaking like a politician: "I'm very happy that we you are 
criticizing this." :-) Well, actually I had the feeling that Linux users 
are not happy with the Configurator. But as long as no one is 
complaining, not much attention is paid.

There had been problems with the Configurator from time to time on both 
platforms. They are mainly caused by directory path problems. Lua is 
extremely stable and never ever caused any problems here. Not sure, if I 
like this language really, but the runtime is very small, the code is 
very well done and highly portable, and it seems to be quite powerful, 
specially when used with C and C++.

If you are using wxWidgets 2.6, that _may_ cause trouble as well. Better 
try the latest 2.8. There are still problems on Linux sometimes, but 
nothing that really hurts. Sometimes the windows are not properly sized. 
Resizing the main window or maximize and restore will help. The 
Configurator inherited some very special controls from the original ecos 
config. Over the time GTK and wxWidgets changed a lot and some features 
used by these special controls did change as well. Anyway, as explained, 
this is no big deal and can be fixed sooner or later. Btw. your are 
using the latest Configurator from CVS HEAD or Nut/OS 4.4, aren't you?

Problem number 1 is this, however: We are using the autotools to build 
the source package from CVS. Unfortunately CVS root is 'nut', while the 
Windows installation is ethernut-x.y.z, where 'nut' is a subdirectory 
of. This difference in the directory structure caused problems all the 
time. Something got fixed on Windows, but caused problems on Linux and 
vice versa.

IMHO, the best solution would be to get the same directory structure on 
both platforms. In other words, ethernut-x.y.z is the top installation 
directory and the location to start all build tools from. Directory nut 
is just the source tree below the installation directory. But I'm not 
using autotools too often and have no idea what's the smartest way to 
get this done.

Last not least, I have no objections to use a different tool like 
kconfig. Of course we must avoid maintenance of two different 
configuration scripts. It's already a nasty task to keep the Makefiles 
up-to-date for native building in the source tree. Probably kconfig 
configurations can be converted to Lua parts or vice versa or both may 
be build from a global XML format or whatever.

Harald


P.S.: Somewhat off topic. While talking about tools, I was recently 
forced to use scons
http://www.scons.org/
I was impressed. The only problem is, that it requires Python, which 
caused some minor problems on Windows, which doesn't handle dependencies 
very well. Anyway, it worked like a charm.