Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

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

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 11:49:59AM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 11:30:17AM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>You can make similar statements about any of the libraries which gdb
>>uses, like ncurses or glibc.  And, you can flip it around, too.
>>Distros are apt to fix bugs when they are detected.  Are we going to
>>have someone scanning bugtraq, the expat web site, and the
>>Fedora/Gentoo/Ubuntu/Debian web sites looking for updates?
>
>For the record, Debian has a strict policy against this sort of
>inclusion.  We already do not use the readline shipped with GDB.  I do
>not plan to use GDB's expat, either, if it ends up included.

Huh.  Interesting.  Good for Debian.

>> >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.
>> 
>> But readline has been a fork for a long time and, since it is statically
>
>Actually, at my latest merge the local changes to readline were fairly
>small.  I believe most of them were for either DJGPP or Cygwin.

Right.  I know that.  I see the convergence but still I think my point
stands.

>>There is also the meta issue here of assuming that gdb owns the 'src'
>>directory and has the right to put things there without discussion with
>>the other projects who use the directory.  IMO, the polite thing to do
>>is to mention this to the other projects.
>
>I can if you want, but (A) there's no overall src mailing list, despite
>at least one attempt to make one, and (B) it won't get in anyone else's
>way, so I'm not sure why.  But I'll wait and see how this discussion
>progresses, first.

I *really* doubt that anyone would object but there is always the chance
that some other project was looking to use an xml library and might have
opinions on the subject.

I still don't understand why gdb is different from most other projects and
requires the existence of an in-tree library rather than just checking for
it via configure.

cgf