Re: Lets rename insight to "insight" (imagine that)

[Jim Ingham <jingham at apple dot com>]

Mo,

> From: Mo DeJong <mdejong@cygnus.com>
> Date: Thu Nov 16, 2000  02:45:00 PM US/Pacific
> To: insight@sources.redhat.com
> Subject: Re: Lets rename insight to "insight" (imagine that)
> 
> > mdejong@cygnus.com (Mo DeJong) writes:
> 
> > > What is the cause of these problems? The unfortunate
> > > naming of the Insight executable. For some reason
> > > it is called "gdb". This is in despite of the fact
> > > that it is clearly not the gdb that most people
> > > expect to get when typing the command "gdb".
> > > 
> > > I suggest we change the name of the Insight executable
> > > to "insight". This will make things far more intuitive
> > > and will save us time and money in the long run.
> > > 
> > > I would also like to get Insight installed on the
> > > default Red Hat release, but that is not currently
> > > possible because /usr/bin/gdb is already taken.
> > 
> > What is /usr/bin/gdb taken by, if not gdb?  and, insight without
> > windows _is_ gdb, with some extra mostly-unused stuff thrown in, eh?
> 
> The way I see it, Insight is a GUI debugger interface. It also
> supports a gdb command line interface when run with the -nw
> flag. What distro packager is going to think, hey lets replace
> gdb with gdb + some extra mostly-unused stuff thrown in?

But, in fact, insight IS a COMPLETE copy of gdb.  If you have it, there is no reason for another copy of gdb.  So you need to make it easy to use the same binary for gdb command-line & gdb with the Tk bits thrown in.

> 
> > Well, it seems to me that by default, you want to install
> > (gdb==insight), under the names gdb and insight, with the former
> > providing the normal behaviour, and the latter providing windows.
> 
> Nope. By default we should install just the "insight" executable.
> We should not clobber the system gdb (by putting our gdb 5.0 on the
> PATH).

I disagree.  Why would you want to introduce the confusion of shipping two potentially different gdb's.  Insight is a complete fully featured command line debugger, as well as a complete, fully featured GUI debugger.  No other copy is necessary, and the support costs of "How do I start Insight" are trivial compared to sorting out which of the two versions of gdb on the system were actually used...

> 
> > It's a shame to have to waste N more megabytes on a gdb binary, when
> > insight will do either.
> 
> 
> Some on disk numbers from my build:
> 
> ls -la ~/project/install/insight/bin/gdb
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 mo       mo        8797610 Oct 26 09:36 /home/mo/project/
> install/insight/bin/gdb
> 
> % ls -la /usr/bin/gdb
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root      1290416 Mar  7  2000 /usr/bin/gdb
> 
> 
> Insight is a lot bigger than command line gdb.
> 
>  

This must be wrong.  I bet the one in /home/mo has debugging symbols still in it, and the one in /usr/bin/gdb is stripped.  No way Insight is that much bigger than gdb, even if you include the Tcl/Tk/Tix libraries (which ought to be shared, but I don't think we ship it that way) I don't think you get an extra 7.5 meg.  And the GUI related code is gdb is not all that much...

> > My personal favorite solution (and what I use in my own source trees)
> > is to:
> > 
> > 	* whack top.c so that use_windows = 0 by default.
> > 
> > 	* install as gdb.
> > 
> > 	* if insight-style windowing support is present, a simple
> > 	script called 'insight' to invoke gdb with the -w flag and the
> > 	rest of the remaining script arguments.

Or just tell people to do 

alias insight="gdb -w"

> > 
> > I think, in general, that's probably the appropriate solution to the
> > issue.
> 
> That would still clobber the existing gdb. It means we can't
> make an RPM for Insight because it would conflict with
> the /usr/bin/gdb executable from regular gdb.

I really don't think you want to be shipping two gdb's but that is your business, not mine...

Jim

--
Jim Ingham                                   jingham@apple.com
Developer Tools - gdb
Apple Computer