Okay, to answer some questions:
Were you aware that Atmel (now Microchip) has been distributing a CLI toolchain?
No, I wasn't. This all feels a bit pointless now...
A long time ago, I needed an up-to-date Windows toolchain so I could use my AVR Dragon JTAG unit, and this project started from there. Finally made the current version because I was so sick of having to disable driver signature enforcement (to use my programmer via libusb-win32) and having it reenabled with each Windows update breaking everything.
why avr-gcc 7.2?
That... was the current version when I started the project. It took a while to actually get things working, especially with all the fiddling around with Insight and Tcl trying to get that to work.
32bit executables would work on both 32bit and 64bit windows.
Honestly I kind of forgot that 32-bit windows was still in use. At the moment all of my toolchains and dependency libraries are all 64-bit, so it would be an immense amount of work to produce 32-bit builds.
What are your ongoing plans?
I'm not really sure. If I get a chance, I'll try to make an updated build soon. Because of all the cajoling it took to get each and every program built, my build process was extremely manual. The only parts I have scripted are building all the arduino cores (linked above) and making the zip file out of the installation prefix folder.
I'd like to have a 'light' alternative to arduino ide, and by light let's say it is not the Atmel Studio way.
That was 100% what I was going for with this project! It gives you everything you need to write Arduino programs in just one 24MB package (plus optionally installing CMake).
hummm, some guidance about how to set this up would be a good thing too.
I do talk about that, in Appendix B of the main post. While you can use the AVR Makefile tool if you want, the CMake toolchain file I provided is the best and most efficient way to use this toolchain. It gives you a lightweight way to manage your project that is still powerful and works on every platform.