While I'm sympathetic to the cries of inadequate (or sometimes just plain wrong) documentation, I think this needs to be met with more understanding.
The Open Source development community is comprised of some rather clever people that are prepared to sit and write useful software in their spare time for free and for nothing. People that write software are notoriously reluctant to sit and write documentation because, well, they just don't like doing it. Unfortunately, this places some pressure upon would-be users to provide some input of their own, which is to examine the source code for themselves and learn by experimentation - it's those same people that might later decide to contribute with documentation, worked examples "howto" guides and so-on, should they wish to join this very generous community themselves. Unfortunately people have come to expect a professional finish (which it does get eventually) from people who are toiling away in their spare time, and this is a bit unrealistic. I don't admonish anyone to look at source code, rather exhort them to in the hope that they themselves might be able to contribute to the project one day. Projects like SDCC are going to be niche projects with only a limited number of people able to contribute, and I've no doubt these people have day-jobs too. Bigger projects, like Open Office and Linux tend to be much better documented and better generally because of the comparatively large number of people behind them, and indeed through sponsorship - Linus Torvalds develops and maintains Linux for a living, for example. If enough money could be raked together to sponsor someone, or a group, to develop and maintain SDCC then we would no-doubt see superb developments in a much shorter timescale; but this is probably an unlikely turn of events. Then again, maybe if someone wants to try and persuade, say, Microchip Inc that it's in their interests to sponsor the development of the PIC forks of SDCC, then who knows? Even then, wrangling with companies over sponsorship is time away from the project coal-face, and many programmers would find this tedious. There is a quite nice C compiler for PICs from some Australian outfit, I think, (I cannot remember the name) but this will cost you around £400 (GBP 400), and the documentation is good and I found the simulator and cut-down teaser version very good when I last tried it; but I don't want to cough-up £400 or so for the full-blown product for projects that I write for free to help people out. For myself, I don't want to be forced to use Windows, so SDCC is great if you're a Linux user, which I am, exclusively. When I've written some worthwhile stuff for the Z80/Z180 fork, I'll offer it as example code specifically to help others, and no-doubt I could make some amendments to the manual too. So, I'm suggesting that if you can do better then please feel free to do so. Constructive criticism and bug reports are great too. When you're an Open Source user you're also a developer, in however modest a way that might be. Complaining, well... A last word for Windows users (apart from to try and wean yourselves off it!), try searching your file system for z180.h - once you have found this you will have found the general area of includes and libraries and such. /usr refers to a Unix/Linux file system and the Windows setup is probably different. -- Richard. PGP Key-id: 0x5AB3D350 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Sdcc-user mailing list Sdcc-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sdcc-user
