Hello Zach and the list, Zach Welch napsal(a): > If we are pursuing all of these at one time, our collective resources > are not being used efficiently. It's nice to see all the activity, but > I think we could make more productive use of our collective time. Now, > I am *not* asking anyone to change what they are doing, but "what if" > _everyone_ just buckles down and focuses on fixing libusb and libftdi? > > As I said at the start of all of this, this option seems like the best > use of the community's resources:
This path is IMHO very far from best solution, remember that FTDI chips evolve, there are several variants on the market today. Is it really a good idea to maintain compatibility with future chips? Is this not exactly the task for a device driver? Be the answer yes or no (I assume yes) this is definitely not a task for OpenOCD itself. FTDI delivers a solution which is so popular _mainly_ for the fact that it is easy to use without necessity to implement low level USB stuff. Maintaining a driver for hw solution which is still _closed_ and noone knows for how long it will be produced is _totally_pointless_ - especially when speaking about long term solution. Moreover FTDI is not the only USB chip in the world. And finally libusb is a hack which moves driver to userspace, and it may be necessary to digitally sign it (Windows). Who is going to pay for a signing certificate? If we want OpenOCD to support various JTAG interfaces, even commercial ones (I see no problem in that, it is the same as buying computer hardware) the _only_ option is to create a _single_standard_ interface between OpenOCD and JTAG hw driver. I see support for commercially sold JTAG interfaces as very good thing, it brings to the community those people who prefer having professional JTAG interface over soldering together some free circuitry. So if this has to happen I vote for vendor neutral solution: a) adding "controlled interface" http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface which is probably legally complitated b) use suitable communication method like sockets, may be easily built on top of bitq.c > (a) It will be the best contribution to the free software community. And even better contribution to FTDI - why shall we prefer any single manufacturer? > Developers: are there others that want to follow this same path? For myself - no. 1> Distributors: do you want to deliver this solution to your users, if not > today then someday? Again, not all JTAG interafaces which may be potentially used woth OpenOCD have to be built using FTDI. Best regards, Pavel _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list Openocd-development@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
