Re: Current Status of Insight

["E. Weddington" <ericw@evcohs.com>]

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> It seems that there is at least 6 people that care:
>
> (in no particular order, and sorry if i list you and you dont really 
> care)
>
> 1. Keith Seitz
> 2. Duane Ellis
> 3. Roland Schwingel
> 4. Paul Schlie
> 5. Christopher Faylor
> 6. Steven Johnson (me)
> And Maybe (although it is less than clear from their posts):
> 7. Nickolay Kolchin
> 8. Jon Beniston
>
> Anybody else care to add their name to this list of people that care 
> about, or at the very least use a version of insight and would like to 
> see it continue in some form. 

Add my name.

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.

Eric Weddington