preview of uniarch mspgcc for experienced developers

Time to kick this fledgling out of the nest and see if it flies or becomes
catfood.

The uniarch release of mspgcc is now available for alpha testing by experts.
 Not all changes are in place, but most user-visible ones should be stable.
 I've successfully built TinyOS programs with this using the current TinyOS
trunk off Google Code; you'll get a warning about referencing the deprecated
<io.h> but otherwise it seems fine.

Note: This version should support every one of the 290+ chips in the TI
MSP430 product line, has a little bit of cleanup including unit tests for
function attributes and builtins, and uses the improved optimizations in gcc
4.5.  All the other enhancements, including 20-bit support, are yet to come.
 Patience is a virtue.

By "experts" I mean that for now you need minimal fluency with git, and
should follow the instructions at:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/mspgcc/index.php?title=Devel:UniarchGit

If you discover errors in that description, please let me know, but I won't
be answering general questions about how to use git or to build the tools.
Be aware that the full set of repositories is about 800MB (gcc alone is
571MB) to download; altogether you'll need about 2GB for the unpacked
sources, a build area, and installation.

I am not imposing a version numbering scheme at this time.  After it's clear
somebody other than me can make this work, I'll provide patches against
upstream releases (binutils 2.21 and gcc 4.5.2) and a little more packaging
support in msp430mcu so people can build things without git.  Each set of
patches that are expected to work together will be placed in the mspgcc
repository and will be assigned a version number based on the release date.

Please DO NOT package any of these files for distribution.  My intent is to
use releases based on gcc 4.5.2 to work out the kinks.  I do not guarantee
there won't be changes in object file formats, interface, or anything else.
Once everything looks good from the msp430 side, I'll update the development
branches to be based on gcc 4.6.0, which will be the initial stable release
for uniarch, and the basis of all future enhancements.

I'll be updating various documentation, both on the wiki and in the user's
manual.  The users manual in particular is way out of date.  Note that I
favor explicit use of builtins and GCC attributes, rather than the syntactic
sugar supplied by <iomacros.h> and <signal.h>.  When you find that old code
doesn't compile, consider that a bug, but whether it's fixed will depend on
circumstances.  Everything that I broke intentionally has a "new, improved"
way of being done.
https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/mspgcc/index.php?title=Devel:Uniarch#User_Visible_Changesis
one place where I'm putting a list of those changes.

When you run into problems, file a tracker ticket on the mspgcc (NOT
mspgcc4) SourceForge tracker, or email this list or me directly.

Peter

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