Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at false dot org>]

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 11:30:17AM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> You can make similar statements about any of the libraries which gdb
> uses, like ncurses or glibc.  And, you can flip it around, too.  Distros
> are apt to fix bugs when they are detected.  Are we going to have someone
> scanning bugtraq, the expat web site, and the
> Fedora/Gentoo/Ubuntu/Debian web sites looking for updates?

For the record, Debian has a strict policy against this sort of
inclusion.  We already do not use the readline shipped with GDB. I do
not plan to use GDB's expat, either, if it ends up included.

> >So even thought we should make a decision on a case by case basis,
> >I would be inclined in this case to include libexpat. I don't think
> >we're actually doing a fork. I think it's like readline: we try to
> >push the patch to the authors first before putting it in our copy.
> 
> But readline has been a fork for a long time and, since it is statically

Actually, at my latest merge the local changes to readline were fairly
small.  I believe most of them were for either DJGPP or Cygwin.

> There is also the meta issue here of assuming that gdb owns the 'src'
> directory and has the right to put things there without discussion with
> the other projects who use the directory.  IMO, the polite thing to do is
> to mention this to the other projects.

I can if you want, but (A) there's no overall src mailing list,
despite at least one attempt to make one, and (B) it won't get in
anyone else's way, so I'm not sure why.  But I'll wait and see how this
discussion progresses, first.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery