Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-gdb-patches@sourceware.org>]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 09:40:48AM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>At the beginning of the year, I proposed adding an XML parsing library to
>GDB.

...and, FWIW, there's already an expat directory at the top-level of src
which exists entirely as a branch (which you <Daniel> announced).

Just as a meta-issue, I have to wonder at the precedent of one of the
projects which shares 'src' adding directories to the top-level.

I just built gdb on linux and I see that it pulls in ncurses but there
is no ncurses directory in src.  Why can't we just say that "building
gdb requires a native expat library >= some version" like we do with
ncurses?  Any other project which uses expat would just add detection of
the expat library to the configure phase.

I've really always hated the habit of duplicating (and essentially forking)
other project's source code in 'src' and putting expat there just seems
like a step backwards to me.

cgf