Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

Daniel Jacobowitz
2006-07-23T22:57:18Z

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