Re: [PATCH/WIP] C/C++ wchar_t/Unicode printing support

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker at adacore dot com>]

Hi Tom,

I'm not very familiar with character encodings, so I won't review
the patch.  However, something caught my attention:

> * With this patch, GDB requires iconv.  I don't think it is a good use
>   of our time to implement and maintain our own character set
>   conversion library.  I removed all the old code in charset.c that
>   attempted this.

External dependencies of this sort can be a real issue. It's probably
not very hard as you mention to build it on our machines, but that
still leaves the problem of distribution. In other words, when we
distribute a GDB binary to one of our customers, we pretty much need
to distribute the iconv library as well.

Do you think we could have a configure option that allows us to
deactivate this feature in order to avoid the dependency?  The other
alternative is to have a configure option that allows us to specify
where to look for the iconv library and headers. At our level, we
would then link GDB against the static libiconv. It makes the GDB
exe bigger but that's in exchange for an extra feature... In fact,
both options are actually independent and have merits on their own,
but either of them would be sufficient to help avoiding a dynamic
dependency on a shared library...

-- 
Joel