Isn't Insight a little bloated?

[James Ingham <jingham@cygnus.com>]

Toby,

 > I haven't actually managed to build Insight yet for a couple of
 > reasons.
 > 
 > Fristly, I'm running FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE and have learned that gdb-4.18
 > doesn't build 'out of the box'.  The FreeBSD core maintainers have
 > taken the source, started a collection of their own patches and have
 > incorporated it into the 'world' build process with their own
 > makefiles.  Why these patches haven't been folded back into the proper
 > distro is beyond me.  So I have gdb 4.18 on the system, but I can't
 > take gdb-4.18.tar.bz2 and fiddle with it without a lot of work.
 > Anyone else running FreeBSD out there?

Have these patches been sent to the gdb-patches list?

 > 
 > Secondly, it's huge!  Why are tcl, tk, itcl, itk and tix all bundled
 > in with Insight?  I already have tcl, tk, itcl and itk installed, and
 > with the FreeBSD ports it's very easy to get tix on there too.  I've
 > tried a couple of times to get Insight configured to use the already
 > installed software with the --with-tcl=... (off the top of my head,
 > sorry) pointing to tclConfig.sh, etc. but it still insists on trying
 > to rebuild it's own version of tcl, tk, etc.  The tarball is 15 meg!

The version of Tcl/Tk/etc that we use for Insight is a bit hacked up
from the standard one.  Many of the fixes are to get it to build under
cygwin, so they are probably not necessary under Unix.  But there are
a couple of crashing bugs in Itcl that needed fixing, and some other
random mods that have not made it back to the Scriptics Tcl repository
yet.  And the net distribution of Tix doesn't build with Itcl 3.0 &
the later Tcl's, and so far as I can tell there is no official
maintainer of this...  We have fixed a bunch of bugs in Tix.

So right now, I doubt that Insight will actually work with the net
version of Tcl/Tk, and I know the net version of Itcl will crash.  We
are working to get as many of our local modifications into the
Scriptics repository as possible, but we probably won't be done with
this till we can move Insight to Tcl/Tk 8.2, since Scriptics is no
longer working on the 8.0 or 8.1 variants.

 > 
 > Personally, I'm looking for gdb with better source and watch
 > listings.  ie.  I love the readline interface to gdb, tab completion,
 > etc. and don't like the mouse.  But gdb's 'list' is really lacking.
 > Frontends like DDD are too mouse oriented and busy.  So, Insight
 > sounds great if it wasn't so cludgy to build.   Sigh.

Were there any problems with building the whole tarball that we
posted?  Or was it just that you couldn't get it to use your installed 
versions of Tcl/Tk?  If the former, please send on details, this
should certainly work smoothly.  If the latter, as I said earlier, had 
you been able to build it, I am pretty sure it would not have worked
anyway, so this is not yet a big concern.

 > 
 > Whew, had to get that off my chest.  I'm using gdb under XEmacs at the 
 > moment, which is the closest to what I want, but it's still not as
 > great as plain gdb.  If only gdb had a nice listing!  I'm almost
 > considering playing with my installed FreeBSD gdb sources to improve
 > the built in list mechanism...

If you do this, and get something that you like more, send us the
patch and we will look at it.

Jim

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Jim Ingham                                              jingham@cygnus.com
Cygnus Solutions Inc.