Re: [PATCH] Fix python compatibility with old versions of GDB

Eli Zaretskii
2017-06-13T19:30:59Z

> Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2017 19:29:21 +0200
> From: Simon Marchi <simon.marchi@polymtl.ca>
> Cc: Tom Tromey <tom@tromey.com>, orgads@gmail.com,
> gdb-patches@sourceware.org
>
> On 2017-06-13 16:44, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > FWIW, I always configure GDB to use a version-specific data-directory,
> > because I leave old GDB versions (renamed) on my system, so I could
> > still use them after installing a new version. E.g., if the new
> > version turns out to have a bug. I would actually be happier if we
> > changed our installation scripts to do that by default, because the
> > scripts are almost never backward-compatible IME.
>
> Can you give more details on what you think could/should be done by
> default?

I'd like the data-directory be version-dependent, i.e. be
/usr/share/gdb/VERSION/ and not just /usr/share/gdb/. But I wonder
why that isn't the default behavior, as the files we install into
data-directory are version-dependent and incompatible with other GDB
versions.

> For such a use case, I would compile each gdb with a separate prefix
> (e.g. --prefix=/opt/gdb/<version>), which would give each install its
> own data directory.

That's close to what I do, as described above. I just don't set
"--prefix", because that would affect directories like bindir, mandir,
infodir, which I don't want to keep separately for each version.