Re: GDB and Insight CVS repositories.

[Brendan Simon <brendan@dgs.monash.edu.au>]

Stan Shebs wrote:

>    If so, it makes sense to me that there
>    is only one master source repository for Insight and GDB.  Those that
>    don't want a GUI can build with something like "make all-gdb
>    install-gdb" and those who want the GUI can build with something like
>    "make all install" or "make all-insight install-insight".  It seems
>    logical to me and can't see why 2 repositories should exist.  Maybe this
>    is just an interim thing until Insight is officially released.
>
> Makes sense to me too...  In fact, in a GDB with Insight configured in,
> the GUI comes up by default if an X display is available, unless you
> say "-nw" (we imitated Emacs behavior).
>
>    I guess the other option is to seperate the GUI sources from GDB
>    sources.  I'm not sure of the details of how this would be done but
>    believe it is possible.  Are there any technical reasons why this can't
>    or shouldn't be done.
>
> It could be done.  The main downside to trying to make it a separate
> package is that Insight is linked closely to GDB - it would be
> difficult (though not impossible) to make current Insight sources work
> with vanilla 4.18, for instance.  The "easy" separation would be to
> make it a separate source package that you can unpack on top of a GDB
> source tree - would take a few days to figure that one out.  The
> "hard" separation would be to make Insight a separate program; that
> would be several months of fulltime work.

From a purist point of view I think it would be better to keep the packages
seperate, regardless of whether Insight is built as a seperate application or
an integrated application.  If it is relatively simple to unpack Insight
sources into a seperate sub directory of the GDB source then this sounds like
it would keep RMS happy and keep the GUI repository seperate from the GDB
repository.  I guess this is akin to gcc-core, gcc-c++, gcc-fortran, etc
distribution archives.  I guess the difference is that all these components
are officialy accepted by GNU.

If this was to happen, would this mean that gdb would require patches ?

Does GDB have an external API (interprocess comms, TCP/UDP sockets) so that
other GUIs could communicate without having to parse CLI output ?

Brendan Simon.