building gdb from git

building gdb from git

[Bob Rossi]

Hi,

When I clone git I get quite a few projects.

What's the simplest way to build only gdb?

My first attempt was to do this:
    ../binutils-gdb/gdb/configure --prefix=$PWD/../prefix
however this failed with a missing bfd.h.

In general, if I only really want to build/modify gdb,
should I attempt to build everything like,
    ../binutils-gdb/configure --prefix=$PWD/../prefix
or should I install the dev packages for everything I'm missing?

Also, why does configure work and let the build fail, rather than
having configure detect the missing header files?

Thanks,
Bob Rossi

Re: building gdb from git

[Doug Evans]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:21 PM, Bob Rossi <bob@brasko.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> When I clone git I get quite a few projects.
>
> What's the simplest way to build only gdb?
>
> My first attempt was to do this:
>     ../binutils-gdb/gdb/configure --prefix=$PWD/../prefix
> however this failed with a missing bfd.h.
>
> In general, if I only really want to build/modify gdb,
> should I attempt to build everything like,
>     ../binutils-gdb/configure --prefix=$PWD/../prefix
> or should I install the dev packages for everything I'm missing?

You need to run configure from the top level.
I.e.
../binutils-gdb/configure ...
not
../binutils-gdb/gdb/configure ...

gdb uses several libraries in the binutils-gdb repo and those must be
built first.

You're probably worried that if you run the top level configure and
then do "make" that will build everything including
gas,ld,binutils,etc. and not just the gdb you want.
One solution to this is to do "make all-gdb" instead of "make".

There are also configure options to disable building of pieces so that
"make" will then build just gdb.
../binutils-gdb/configure --disable-gas --disable-binutils
--disable-ld --disable-gold --disable-gprof

[I think(!) I spelled those right and I think(!) I remembered
everything to disable.]