I've been happily using the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain for a while. Recently this was discontinued in favour of the Arm GNU Toolchain which combines both the embedded and non-embedded toolchains into a single package.
This bloats the installation to 5GiB on Windows! (Previously was under 1GiB).
Additionally GDB now depends on Python 2.7, which seems very backwards to me and complicates the installation process. (Previously there was a separate arm-none-eabi-gdb-py, which users were free to ignore if they didn't need the Python functionality).
arm-none-eabi-gdb-py
These changes feel like a step in the wrong direction. My projects do not target ARM Linux, they only require an embedded ARM toolchain. I now feel that Windows users who might be interested in trying them are just going to give up because they don't have the bandwidth or hard disk space or just don't want to install an obsolete version of Python.
Would you consider splitting the toolchains up again?
(Apologies for the negative post, I do really appreciate that you folks maintain and make this toolchain available in the first place, but I felt I had to get this off my chest.)
Thanks,
Jeremy
I share Jeremy's concerns, and I'd like my voice to also be heard in that the massively increased disk space requirement has affected some of my users negatively; mostly due to the lengthy download time now required for setting up the toolchain, although (quite humorously) I've had one user who could no longer continue development due to disk requirements exceeding what they had allotted for Arm embedded development.
To be a bit more transparent, the libraries for A, R, and M class processors are not utilised by my particular users, so from their perspective there has been a surprise increase in download size requirement, coupled with new requirements for a Python install, and compatibility breaking bugs in gnu-as (an issue I understand is now solved).
Versus the many customers taking full advantage of the libraries for A, R, and M class processors, I realistically imagine there's not much that can be done for my users, other than forking the Arm GNU Toolchain ¯\_(ツ)_/¯