Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

Daniel Jacobowitz
2006-07-23T22:03:33Z

On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 11:51:56PM +0200, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> My main concern here, is how much the new xml-based developments this
> will grow GDB. Linking the final gdb executable is already getting
> problematic on small memory systems. How big is libexpat.a, and how
> much does a flash-enabled GDB grow?

Ah, that's why I picked expat, instead of the more convenient DOM
implementations (which are huge).

On x86_64, libexpat.a is 600K, with debugging information enabled.
Code size is only about 140K of that. For comparison, remote.o is 70K
code size and 280K with debug info. So it's two to three new files
worth of code - in my opinion, this is an acceptable cost. What do you
think - workable?

> Another question I have is about how we think to handle expat in the
> future. Is expat still undergoing much development? Are you planning
> to update expat regularly?

Not particularly. Expat 2.0.0 was released in January 2006, so it's
still maintained, but there haven't been any releases since then, so
it's not churning particularly. I don't think it likely that we'll
need any cutting edge features from it, either. My plan was to import
2.0.0 and leave it alone as much as possible, unless we encountered a
bug in it.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery