Refactor to clean up and fix console handling #3666
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A breaking change, but should finally see us move away from the chronic edge cases and inconsistent behaviour we have while trying to shoe-horn the usb-serial-jtag and cdc-acm consoles into uart behaviour and assumptions.
Added example on using framed data transmission over the console.
Plus, it can serve as a reference for any IDEs which may need/want updating.
jmattsson
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Announcing intent to merge despite lack of peer review — I'd rather be told off than have the project stagnate into obsolescence 🙃 |
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Thank you Jade! Breaking backwards compatibility is ok IMO when the alternatives are worse. Going with the flow wrt IDF is definitely sensible. @serg3295 can I ask you to once again make a PR for the upstream NodeMCU-Tool project such that your changes can be baked into a release by the maintainer. Thank you! |
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@marcelstoer Sure. I have already prepared PRs that provide support for the new esp32 "console" module for the upstream Changes have already been made to the Of course, the |
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Thank you @marcelstoer (and @serg3295 )! |
Fixes #3657.
dev-esp32branch rather than for thereleasebranch.docs/*.In the interest of backwards compatibility I/we have in the past shoehorned the USB-Serial-JTAG and CDC-ACM console types into the
uartmodule via the platform layer. That has kept adding complications and differences in behaviour depending on what the underlying hardware interface is, plus it has been fighting against the IDF's own abstractions in regard to the console.This PR finally "bites the bullet" and moves the system console handling into its own module (
console), and tidies up the platform layer to no longer attempt to special-case things. It also sets the stage for possibly also including a fancier interactive console based onlinenoise, though that requires further investigation and work if so.The downside of course is that various IDEs are accustomed to manipulating the
uartmodule in order to implement file uploads and downloads, and this refactoring obviously breaks that. That said, @serg3295 has already implemented support in the nodemcu-tools VS Code extension and NodeMCU-Tool CLI utility. I've also provided both an example of how to implement a framed transmission in the module documentation, as well as a helper utility (scripts/upload-file.py) which can be used to upload files usingconsolemodule interactions, using said framing scheme.I'm not happy about breaking backwards compatibility, but I'm even less happy about the number of issues that have cropped up due to trying to avoid it when it's clearly time for it. We don't have the person-power here to fight against the direction the IDF is pulling, so imho it's time to follow its lead in the console area.
Testing has been performed on each of UART, USB-Serial-JTAG and CDC-ACM, and additional testing by @serg3295 over in the #3657 thread.