Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

Christopher Faylor
2006-07-23T23:13:23Z

On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 06:57:12PM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>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 obviously missed that discussion, but if it occurred during the time
that I think it did, I have a very good excuse for missing it.

I found your initial announcement about expat but I didn't see (and
actually can't yet find) any discussion about putting expat in 'src'.

Is there a major operating system which doesn't have it easily
available? And, even if there is, why is gdb different from any other
project out there which might rely on expat? Would a tool that downloads
expat source from an official web site and builds it be acceptable?

cgf