Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 06:40:32PM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 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.

I'm going to let you and Mark argue this one out, I'm afraid.

We (CodeSourcery) chose to use XML for a couple of projects in order to
avoid wheel reduplication.  Which means using a pre-written library.
Personally, I think a simple list of libraries that users need in order
to build GDB would be reasonable.  But I was quite specifically told
that other GDB developers (Mark definitely said this - I'm not sure if
Eli did also) were unhappy at the idea of requiring external libraries. 
So I added it to src.

I'd be happy to dump that and put it in the "Installing GDB" chapter of
the manual (and NEWS) instead.  It's not like it's a pain to build; it
configures out of the box everywhere I've tried it.  I like the idea of
using more preinstalled libraries, in general, and as long as we bother
to document our requirements I don't see the problem.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery