Re: Packaging insight for debian

["Eray 'exa' Ozkural" <erayo at cs dot bilkent dot edu dot tr>]

Syd Polk wrote:
> 
> Factoring out the internal versions of tcl/tk is not a good idea. We have
local
> changes to these which could cause random failures, particularly when
running
> the test suite.
> 

Do you think making major changes to a forked tcl/tk is a good idea?
Also, this didn't seem to play very nicely with the debian way of
doing things. Which of course goes something like "if you use a
general-purpose lib or lang. make it available in a generally usable
and uniform way" This is how we cope with perl or tcl/tk. What would
debian be like if every perl application distributed its own perl with it?

A suggestion thus put forth was to put the cygnus versions of those
libs in some place like /usr/lib/insight, but it didn't prove to
be easier than factoring out the libs which seemed to be the right-er
way of doing things.

Anyhow, cygnus's changes to tcl/tk are not major extensions or anything
really new. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to port it to tcl/tk 8.3
It now works, and is probably bug-compatible with the pristine
cygnus (red hat) version. And if you'd tell me that you might be
introducing something major in the future, you'd better introduce it
into the upstream version of tcl/tk. ;) 

I'd be glad if you could give the package I made a try. Most of the
cygnus changes are build-related, and not very relevant to tcl/tk itself.
(or any of its extensions that insight uses)

I didn't just strip insight:
<<
orion:debian$ cat strip-insight 
#! /bin/bash

cd insight-5.0

rm -rf opcodes libiberty opcodes etc texinfo tcl tk itcl itk tix
<<

I left readline, intl, and bfd in there. Was a bit hesitant about
bfd actually but then you can tell me whether this is the same thing
as in binutils-2.10.0.26 :) Is it? I've managed to strip bfd too in
an experimental package, so if they're the same version I can safely
let it be that way.

> Shipping the two versions. The next version of SN will have the same
version as
> Insight, and will have been tested correctly.

That will be a bit difficult, but I'll try to do that. Are they
separate branches or just different versions of the same thing, and
any major differences between the two?

Insight is a very nice debugger [interface], and I'd like to thank all
developers from cygnus and red hat; we just want to have a proper
debian version. :)

Looking forward to your remarks,

Thanks,


PS: By the way, I've understood how difficult it might be to debug a debugger.
Kudos for all the hard work!

PS2: I'm having to mail this from a remote machine because my ISP's
mail server is on the ORBS. Is the only way to talk to the mail admin
at my ISP?

-- 
Eray (exa) Ozkural
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
e-mail: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo