Re: GIT and CVS

Joseph S. Myers
2011-10-13T23:56:24Z

On Fri, 14 Oct 2011, Phil Muldoon wrote:

> > * normal operations (checkouts, updates, tagging etc.) should be done in
> > the normal way for the relevant version control systems, and the
> > non-transparency of various systems for grafting pieces from different
> > repositories tends to rule those out;
>
> I agree on the branching, but I do not understand why GDB has to be
> tagged/branched in tandem with other projects. We survive OK with the
> disparate GCC versions, as well as GLIBC and other close dependencies.

I'm not saying "in tandem". I'm saying "in the normal way". That is, a
normal "git tag" should tag BFD, libiberty etc. along with GDB, no other
special operations needed, pushing the tag should also be done in the
normal way, and so on.

> BFD is an important part of the GDB setup, no doubt it is. But has
> anyone (myself included), talked to the community about it? Is there
> any reason why BFD cannot be an external dependency? GCC, as an
> external dependency has far more radical design shifts, I think, than
> BFD, and we cope just fine.

BFD, by design, does not have a stable ABI or API and is closely tied to
its clients. The same applies to libiberty (in principle anyway; in
practice it may be more stable than BFD so you have more chance of a
different libiberty version working with a libiberty client).

On the other hand, I'd quite like to see readline not go in the
gdb+binutils repository; that ought to be considered an external
dependency that you can drop in to the source tree yourself if you want to
build it that way.

--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com