Re: [PATCH v2 2/7] Add "help news"

Simon Marchi
2020-07-06T14:06:03Z

On 2020-06-23 9:20 a.m., Tom Tromey wrote:
> This adds a "help news" subcommand, which simply dumps the NEWS file.
> The NEWS file is now installed.

(1) I first tried "help news" with GDB in its build directory without passing
--data-directory, expecting it to fail, just to see how it would fail. It
says:

(gdb) help news
could not open the NEWS file: No such file or directory.

Maybe this message should say which path it's trying to open. If this
happens, the cause would probably be a broken GDB installation, and it
would be useful to know where is GDB looking for that file.

(2) When trying to "make install", I get this error:

$ make install DESTDIR=/tmp/install
...
make[4]: *** No rule to make target 'install-news', needed by 'install-only'. Stop.

Indeed, the install-news target is used but does not exist.

(3) Since we look for the NEWS file at <data-directory>/NEWS, I presume it won't
work when running GDB in its build directory, either with

./gdb --data-directory=data-directory

or

make run

since the NEWS file is not there. It's not a big deal, but if you think of an easy
way to make it work, it would be nice. Can we put a symlink from data-directory/NEWS
to NEWS?

(4) I tried what I mentioned just above and I get some sanitizer error:

$ ./gdb -q -nx --data-directory=data-directory
(gdb) help news
/home/simark/src/binutils-gdb/gdb/cli/cli-decode.c:1214:60: runtime error: index 1024 out of bounds for type 'char [1024]'

Not sure if it's ASan or UBSan.

Simon