Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

Joel Brobecker
2006-07-24T06:20:11Z

> Any UNIX-like system shipped within the last decade comes with a
> decent curses implementation, wo we consider it to be a part of the
> operating system. Apart from Linux there are probably no systems that
> ship with expat. And even on most Linux systems expat won't be usable
> because the bloody expat "development" package isn't installed.

Plus: Having it in our source tree allows us to have a good knowledge
and control of what we have. What if a user has a whather-distro-modified
version of libexpat and this version has a big bug in it? Or what if
the current released version has a bug that we just fixed? I think
not having it in our tree makes it more difficult for our users
to build GDB, and that should also count.

I don't want to make a policy of it, but having something as small
as libexpat, especially since it doesn't seem to be evolving much,
seems better than documenting the requirement of having it installed
on the system.

So even thought we should make a decision on a case by case basis,
I would be inclined in this case to include libexpat. I don't think
we're actually doing a fork. I think it's like readline: we try to
push the patch to the authors first before putting it in our copy.

--
Joel