Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 01:18:31AM +0200, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> Depending on an external expat package comes with the additional
> maintenance cost of testing the detection code and handling additional
> bug reports from people who can't build gdb because of problems with
> expat.

I don't think this is a high cost, I really don't.  We should document
our own requirements clearly.  If we have requirements that themselves
have complicated dependency chains - I don't know if we will - then we
can even document that.

> Depending on an external expat would be acceptable for me if the bits
> of GDB that depend on it would become optional, such that we can
> choose not to build them if expat is not available.

That's far more error-prone than either alternative.  You complained
about the cost of testing the detection code, which I think is pretty
trivial; but this would require testing two different code paths in GDB
itself, and fielding "my flash doesn't work" bug reports from people
who failed to link against expat.

For scripting language support, I've been considering optional
dependencies, but for absolutely everything else I think we should
avoid them.  Ship it, or require it at configure time, please.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery