Hi,
during the last developer meeting we had some discussions about the next steps for xpcc.
In my opinion one of the main problems in using xpcc for bigger projects is its build system. Although I like SCons and and implemented its beginning in xpcc, it has grown to much into a system builder. That is fine as long as xpcc is your primary platform, but makes it really awkward in cases where it is not. It also makes it difficult to full integrate it into IDEs like Eclipse, because the indexer has some problems deciding which file is used and which isn't.
Another problem off xpcc is its size in combination with the release management. A fresh checkout is 77 MB at the moment, without the Git history its still 43 MB. In general that is not that much, but becomes annoying when you have a lot of small projects which you need to support in with different versions. Without a useful version schema, each project needs its own separate copy of the library. It is not possible/to much work to keep all projects always up-to-date to the most recent version of xpcc. Yet still new features are only added to newer versions, therefore it is also not useful to freeze an older version for all projects.
To solve these issues a possible solution is extract the system builder part of the SCons system (basically everything in /architecture) into a separate tool and make the remaining parts more modular. One approach for this would be the library builder [1]. With this, a project would no longer be build against the complete library, but a subset of the library would be bundled together, containing only the needed and applicable parts for the project/architecture. E.g. a LPC11 application does not need all the STM32F.. library code. This greatly reduces the complexity of the generated source tree, which allows for an easy integration with IDEs and build systems other than SCons.
The disadvantage mainly comes for the library developer, because the generation of the library becomes a separate step. For most projects you do this once at the beginning, after you selected your target architecture, but for library development you generate the library all the time. It may require a different workflow, by developing a new feature within a project, and only after it is finished moving it into the library.
So how to start the work on this: Niklas already reserved modm-io on GitHub (modm stands for "Modular Object-Oriented Development for Microcontrollers") to resolve the naming issues between xpcc (the protocol) and xpcc (the library). I would start to migrating code from the xpcc repository over, separating it into independent modules. This requires a lot of structural changes which makes it difficult to automatically merge changes from xpcc to modm. The device driver generation part of SCons would be extracted into a separate tool which generates the content of the architecture folder. This will be the biggest amount of work. This tool will then be used by the library builder to combine the architecture stuff with the other parts of the library.
So far the idea, any comments/other suggestions on that?
Cheers, Fabian