GDB and Insight CVS repositories.

GDB and Insight CVS repositories.

[Brendan Simon]

I've heard that tGDB and Insight have seperate CVS repositories.  Is
this true ?

Since Insight has the full GDB source included, I can see
synchronisation problems between the repositories.  I believe (not 100%
sure) that stock standard GDB (without the GUI) can be built from the
Insight sources.  Is this true ?  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.

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.

Brendan Simon.

Re: GDB and Insight CVS repositories.

[Andrew Cagney]

Brendan Simon wrote:
> 
> I've heard that tGDB and Insight have seperate CVS repositories.  Is
> this true ?

Cygnus maintains an internal source base that contains both GDB and
Insight.
Sourceware has:

	o	a CVS repository with approved GDB sources

	o	Insight tar archives and patches

Since the Insight mods to GDB are not approved they are not allowed to
be put in the CVS repository that contains official GDB sources.

Setting up a further repository on sourceware that contains an
un-approved GDB and Insight is just getting (as you suggest) silly. 
What happens when someone wants to add that Python interface (or even
perl...) are each of those going to end up in separate unofficial
repositories.

	enjoy,
		Andrew

Re: GDB and Insight CVS repositories.

[Stan Shebs]

   Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 09:56:28 +1000
   From: Brendan Simon <brendan@dgs.monash.edu.au>

   I've heard that tGDB and Insight have seperate CVS repositories.  Is
   this true ?

There's no sourceware CVS repository for Insight yet.  You're quite right
that two separate repositories would be time-consuming to deal with.  On
the other hand, RMS continues to object to having FSF GDB releases that
include Insight (send to rms@gnu.org to give him your opinion please),
so having a single repository means extra work at release-making time.

   Since Insight has the full GDB source included, I can see
   synchronisation problems between the repositories.  I believe (not 100%
   sure) that stock standard GDB (without the GUI) can be built from the
   Insight sources.  Is this true ?

Yes, the Insight code is an addition to GDB.  There are several additional
C files, a directory of tcl code, the extra libraries such as libgui,
and a handful of patches to regular GDB sources.

   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.

								Stan

Re: GDB and Insight CVS repositories.

[Brendan Simon]

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.

Re: GDB and Insight CVS repositories.

[Andrew Cagney]

Brendan Simon wrote:

> 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 ?

At present yes.  However, I believe that that can be fixed.
See separate my separate e-mail about --with-gdb-interpreter=...  No one
has sat down and taken the time to revamp the startup code so that a
second interpreter can be dropped on - not hard, just needs to be done.

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

Hmm, your doing well.  My things to do today includes write up an
additional e-mail putting forward a way that GDB can progress on this
issue.

	Andrew