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Re: Does anyone use insight on cygwin?


Christopher Faylor wrote:
Does anyone actually use insight on Cygwin?

I do. I am a complete idiot when it comes to using gdb in "normal" mode. Without insight, I'm lost.


Keith Seitz, the insight
maintainer, has recently made changes which will allow insight to work
with a non-special version of tcl/tk rather than the hacked version that
it had previously been built with.  That opens the door to building a
real version of tcl/tk for cygwin and linking insight to it.
Unfortunately, I believe that would mean that insight would need to run
in an X window rather than natively.

Not a problem for me; I don't mind running an Xserver. And I routinely run both cygwin's very old Xserver and the 'free' XMing version.



However, I remember this issue came up several years ago. There were a few arguments in favor of the hacked tcl/tk version of insight:


(1) How do you debug the Xserver if your debugger depends on it?

Of course, there is nobody currently trying to debug the Xserver on cygwin -- or develop it in any way -- so that's most likely a moot point. And besides, this same issue faces *nix developers: there are ways around it. For instance, use a stable Xserver on a different display, and run insight on that display to debug the unstable target Xserver (or a program running on that Xserver).


(2) Red Hat's paying customers expected a standalone debugger, and would balk at a Xserver requirement.


This is even more true now, I would imagine, as cygwin-xfree has been all-but-dead for years. (What? Your debugger requires an Xserver, but you don't provide a current one?) Hopefully some of these problems will soon improve, at least on the X-library, if not X-server, side -- </raises beer vaguely in Yaakov's direction>

OTOH, maybe Red Hat is now providing a different graphical debugger to its embedded customers -- one that uses the MI interface to gdb directly. Like, say, Eclipse does -- and therefore their customers may no longer care about insight. Maybe. I dunno.


Also, this may impact the ability to do error_start=X:\somewhere\insight.exe -- but that's probably not a big deal.


The other alternative is to nuke insight entirely.  Is anyone really
relying on it?  Since I barely test it when I release gdb, I'd expect
that there would be problem reports but I don't remember seeing any for
quite some time.

That's 'cause it works. <g>


I could certainly see splitting the distribution into two packages. This means that 'gdb -w' would fail in strange and wonderful ways if the "insight" package with all of its tcl scripts were not installed, but...maybe that's okay.

--
Chuck

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