There are a few different places where alternatives for setting
environment variables are described. None of them is 100% complete, so
the results are likely to be confusing.
Make a single page on setting environment variables, how the zephyrrc
files work, how the zephyr-env scripts work, and some of the important
environment variables, with appropriate references elsewhere. (This is
inspired by the Arch wiki's excellent page on installing programs.)
Link to it from the getting started and application development pages
instead of repeating the information. This has the benefit of
shortening the getting started guide a bit more.
Add some concrete advice on checking the toolchain environment
variables in particular. This is a stumbling block for beginners.
Signed-off-by: Marti Bolivar <marti.bolivar@nordicsemi.no>
When we move DT infront of Kconfig we are going to need access to a C
toolchain before Kconfig is evaluated. This means it will not be
possible to specify the toolchain used through Kconfig.
To deal with this we ...
Drop support for specifying CROSS_COMPILE through Kconfig. Still
available is the ability to specify CROSS_COMPILE through the
environment or through a CMake variable.
Signed-off-by: Sebastian Bøe <sebastian.boe@nordicsemi.no>
The getting started documentation has become a bit of a mess over
time:
- The reader needs to jump forward and backward in the documents
depending on what their system already has installed (e.g. "start by
cloning Zephyr, oh wait, see below if you don't have Git yet" etc.).
- The operating system setup guides, toolchain setup instructions, and
application build and run information have each become their own
balkanized fiefdom, with duplicated, confusing and sometimes
inconsistent results.
- Linux documentation for all distributions is incomplete in some
places (the Arch documentation in particular is vestigial)
and wrong in others (platforms like Ubuntu still nominally require
tools, like autoconf, that haven't been necessary since we stopped
using the C Kconfig tools)
- The dependencies needed to build the documentation have
gotten *huge* since the LaTeX additions and massively overstate the
footprint of Zephyr's real dependencies. This is particularly a
problem on Linux, where those dependencies were not clearly
separated from those needed to build Zephyr.
- The toolchain setup documentation is confusing and scattered across
the main file and the platform-specific files. There are various
bits of incomplete and/or incorrect information. For example, the
docs imply that you can use the Zephyr SDK on non-Linux hosts, which
isn't true. As another example, some toolchains, such as GNU Arm
Embedded, are documented several times. As a final example, some
toolchains, such as Intel's ISSM, are squirrelled away in the
Windows document when there are Linux builds available.
Overhaul the pages to fix these issues and otherwise clean up the
language. One significant side-effect is that all the
toolchain-related information is rooted in a single toctree. Another
is that it should now be possible to follow the instructions, in
order, on any supported platform.
Signed-off-by: Marti Bolivar <marti@foundries.io>
