Proposal: --with-gdb-interpreter=... --interpreter=...

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com>]

Hello,

We're now starting to see the situtation where GDB can support multiple
interpreters.  At present there is GDB's traditional CLI, the TUI (from
HP) and TCL/TK.  We've had many threads of Python, Perl, Java, Visual
Basic and evey guile interpreters comming in down the track.

What I'd like to do is set in motion  change that should greatly
simplify the integration of various interpreters.  Accordingly I'd like
to propose the following changes:


	o	configure ... --with-gdb-interpreter=<interpreter-list> ...

		This allows the user to specify the interpreter
		(in addition to the default CLI) that is built
		and linked into GDB.

		The configury assumes that there is a directory

			.../gdb/<interperter>

		that contains all the useful bits (Makefile stub,
		sourcecode, ...).


	o	a new option ``--interpreter=...'' that can be used
		to specify the interpreter to use during startup.

Andrew

PS: I need to check that --with is the correct option.
From shebs@cygnus.com Wed Aug 18 17:42:00 1999
From: Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>
To: brendan@dgs.monash.edu.au
Cc: gdb@sourceware.cygnus.com, insight@sourceware.cygnus.com
Subject: Re: GDB and Insight CVS repositories.
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 17:42:00 -0000
Message-id: <199908190042.RAA27565@andros.cygnus.com>
References: <37BB482C.B50ADCBC@dgs.monash.edu.au>
X-SW-Source: 1999-q3/msg00200.html
Content-length: 2403

   Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 09:56:28 +1000
   From: Brendan Simon <brendan@dgs.monash.edu.au>

   I've heard that tGDB and Insight have seperate CVS repositories.  Is
   this true ?

There's no sourceware CVS repository for Insight yet.  You're quite right
that two separate repositories would be time-consuming to deal with.  On
the other hand, RMS continues to object to having FSF GDB releases that
include Insight (send to rms@gnu.org to give him your opinion please),
so having a single repository means extra work at release-making time.

   Since Insight has the full GDB source included, I can see
   synchronisation problems between the repositories.  I believe (not 100%
   sure) that stock standard GDB (without the GUI) can be built from the
   Insight sources.  Is this true ?

Yes, the Insight code is an addition to GDB.  There are several additional
C files, a directory of tcl code, the extra libraries such as libgui,
and a handful of patches to regular GDB sources.

   If so, it makes sense to me that there
   is only one master source repository for Insight and GDB.  Those that
   don't want a GUI can build with something like "make all-gdb
   install-gdb" and those who want the GUI can build with something like
   "make all install" or "make all-insight install-insight".  It seems
   logical to me and can't see why 2 repositories should exist.  Maybe this
   is just an interim thing until Insight is officially released.

Makes sense to me too...  In fact, in a GDB with Insight configured in,
the GUI comes up by default if an X display is available, unless you
say "-nw" (we imitated Emacs behavior).

   I guess the other option is to seperate the GUI sources from GDB
   sources.  I'm not sure of the details of how this would be done but
   believe it is possible.  Are there any technical reasons why this can't
   or shouldn't be done.

It could be done.  The main downside to trying to make it a separate
package is that Insight is linked closely to GDB - it would be
difficult (though not impossible) to make current Insight sources work
with vanilla 4.18, for instance.  The "easy" separation would be to
make it a separate source package that you can unpack on top of a GDB
source tree - would take a few days to figure that one out.  The
"hard" separation would be to make Insight a separate program; that
would be several months of fulltime work.

								Stan