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Bus Pirate Development / Open Source Toolchain, Packaging
It seems like everyone is using (1) Microchip's proprietary IDE to drive the (2) patched up GCC toolchain that includes (3) proprietary Microchip libraries.
If this is in fact the case, I'd love to help add additional options:
#1 already has easy alternatives so I don't think any real work needs to be done there outside of perhaps documentation.
#2 seems mostly good to me. I do think it might be nice if installing the pic30 toolchain was a little easier. To that end I've put together a $10 bounty on an OpenEmbedded package for it on gun.io. I know it's small reward to start with but I'm hoping to grow it over the months.
#3 is still a pretty fuzzy item for me. I'd be interested in hearing about the extent that Microchip's non-free libraries are leveraged by the BP firmware (and plan to go look myself). When I was doing PIC18 coding for school I threw in the towel and used their libraries in a couple places, mostly because I wasn't experienced enough to write my own replacements very quickly.
After building there's also loading and debugging which I haven't really looked at yet.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.