Re: [avr-chat] Can't Install avr-gcc in FreeBSD

[David Brown]

Bob Paddock wrote:
> > E: Yes, I agree, but all my users are on Windows...
>
> Have you ever asked them why?

Perhaps because it's easier to download winavr than get avr-gcc working 
on FreeBSD?

More seriously, there are two main reasons that I see why a lot of 
development work (my own included) is done on windows rather than *nix, 
even though many of the programs used are cross-platform.  One is the 
use of windows-specific hardware and software combinations - AVR Studio 
being an example.  If you have some windows-specific software, you can 
often run it under *nix by using Wine, or even a virtual machine if 
necessary.  But if it requires close contact with hardware, it's a lot 
more difficult (note that I have not actually tried AVR Studio with 
Wine, this is just a general observation).  License locking schemes can 
also make it a lot more difficult to run Windows software on *nix.

Secondly, although decent Linux distros (and FreeBSD) make it extremely 
easy to get hold of and install a wide range of software, this only 
applies to "standard" software for which someone is acting as a 
maintainer.  When you want to install or upgrade any of the tens of 
thousands of packages in the Debian archives, it is vastly easier than 
in the Windows world.  But when you step outside of that, you enter the 
world of dependency resolution, patching, ./configure, and make, instead 
of an InstallShield wizard.  Thus when trying to install avr-gcc on 
FreeBSD you have to fiddle around with -DNOPORTDOCS flags in the "make 
install" line, while on windows you just download the latest winavr 
release.  One day, one of the newer "universal" package systems will 
catch on, so that we'll be able to download and install the latest 
nixavr release, but until that time I doubt if anyone can be bothered 
maintaining the separate deb, rpm, tgz, etc., files needed for all the 
commonly used *nix systems.

Just my two øre,

David