Re: Current Status of Insight

[Christopher Faylor <me@cgf.cx>]

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 09:44:17AM -0600, E. Weddington wrote:
>I build Insight/GDB and include it in the WinAVR package:
><http://sourceforge.net/projects/winavr> Which is a suite of open
>source cross development tools targetting the AVR and hosted on
>Windows.  Note that one of the previous releases of WinAVR has had over
>42,000 downloads.
>
>WinAVR is designed for Windows users, and there are a lot of them where
>WinAVR is their first exposure to the GNU toolchain.  A lot of Windows
>users prefer to have GUI based tools.  Insight is absolutely critical
>in this area as it may be a users first exposure to using GDB.  If they
>get comfortable with using the Insight interface, then that can lead
>them to using the power of the CLI interface of raw GDB.
>
>Unfortunately, most of my interest in Insight is as a
>builder/redistributor, not so much as a developer.  But it would be
>incredibly unfortunate if Insight were to go away.  As it is, I've been
>stuck on building Insight 6.1 (with minimal patches), since there's
>been no further release tarballs.  I have yet to jump into building
>from CVS HEAD.
>
>My concern with forking the project is, IIUC, the fact that GDB and
>Insight closely coupled.  Keith, anybody, correct me if I'm wrong, but
>the Insight executable contains all of GDB.  It's not like Insight is a
>separate GUI program that calls a separate GDB program.  Unfortunately,
>one of down sides to having this close coupling is the fact that
>Insight has not in the past been able to be built as a native Win32
>executable without Cygwin.  Yes, I saw the recent thread on the gdb
>list about building gdb for Windows without Cygwin; I'd rather not go
>over that again.  I just want to throw out that there could be
>advantages about having the GUI decoupled from GDB, especially if
>forked.

Since gdb itself couldn't be built as a native executable on Windows
until recently, I don't see why the inability to do this with insight is
important.  Getting insight working on windows without cygwin shouldn't
be that hard now that gdb works.  However, it will require someone to
actually do the work.

Maybe another question that should be considered is "How much would you
pay (in time or money) to keep insight alive?" If we're talking about
moving insight to the FSF, that doesn't mean that things will get
better.  The problem with insight is not that it doesn't belong to the
FSF.  The problem is that no one is actively responsible for it.  Keith
should be commended for keeping the project alive as much as he has but
we really need someone(s) who are willing to put some work into doing
things like generating snapshots and keeping the web site alive.

This is now the second time I've made this observation but people still
seem to just be responding to the "who's interested" aspect of this
discussion.  To me that's like asking how many people at a ball park are
there because they're interested in watching a ball game.  Of course
everyone here is interested in insight.  The question is what are you
going to devote to keeping insight alive and healthy?

Btw, I notice an executable in the download area of winavr but I don't
see any source code downloads.  The GPL requires that you provide the
source code for any executables that you provide.  Pointing to another
web site is not enough, you have to provide the sources.  Maybe the
source code is actually part of the .exe, though, if that is the case
then nevermind.

cgf