Re: [ECOS] How do you like eCos

["Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" <larwe at larwe dot com>]

Hi Grant,

>We've been using it for about a year now (we've been shipping a
>product that uses eCos for about 4 months).  I've got no
>complaints.  The level of support provided by the mailing list
>is _far_ better than support my colleagues have gotten for
>pSOS.

I'm curious: What specific platform do you use for development, and what is 
your target CPU/architecture?

The reason I ask this is because I have one very major gripe with the free 
open-source level of support from Red Hat, and that is that there is no 
version unification, no known point from which to start, and every time one 
hits a problem one has to start debugging it from the ground up.

I'm wondering if I have experienced my usual Murphyesque ill luck and 
chosen the one maverick platform (pun intended) in the "supported 
platforms" list, but my experience with eCos and its toolchain thus far is 
that almost no component has installed/configured/compiled per the 
installation instructions, and a big part of the problem is that instead of 
providing specific snapshots of known-working versions, the install 
instructions refer to nonexistent historical versions.

Point taken about Linux host being less problematic, but I tried both Linux 
and Cygwin and had only slightly different results. Also, I don't know 
about other embedded engineers, but it is a significant annoyance to me to 
have to use anything other than Win9x for development, because most of the 
special-purpose hardware we use is DOS-only. It's quite painful to have to 
use two PCs instead of one.

One certainly couldn't describe eCOS as a fast track to anything; there are 
a dozen different steep learning curves to be climbed before you can even 
build the OS, much less try to link your own program.

Lewin A.R.W. Edwards (Embedded Engineer)
Got any Commodore 16 or VIC-20 hardware, cartridges, tapes?
Visit http://www.larwe.com/vintage/
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