Re: insight Digest 9 Oct 2000 17:26:02 -0000 Issue 229

[Jim Ingham <jingham at apple dot com>]

Eray,

Having a forked version of Tcl/Tk for Insight is definitely NOT a good thing.  I don't think that anyone would argue with you about this.  And one of the goals for the Insight project, as shown in the TO DO list that Fernando posted last week, is to rectify this situation.  It is a major bar to getting Insight accepted in most of the Linux distributions, since it is not just "not the Debian way" - NOBODY wants to replicate versions of basic libraries like Tcl...

If I remember correctly, there are two major areas that need to be worked out for this to happen.

There are some Cygwin hacks to Tcl that are needed to get Insight to build on Windows.  I think that Mo DeJong has been working with the Tcl folks to get these fixes back into the Tcl sources, but I don't know the status of this work.  While this is probably not terribly important to the Debian world, Cygnus/Red Hat do sell a Windows based toolchains (when I left, they in fact sold more Windows toolchains than Linux ones, in an odd, ironic twist of fate...)  So getting this right is a matter of some importance.

The other bit is that the Regular expression module in Tcl changed a fair bit between Tcl 8.0 and Tcl 8.2.  The changes were very good, IMHO, including support for the Perl-style extensions to regular expression syntax, and Unicode support in regular expressions.  However, they did introduce subtle incompatibilities in the regexp syntax, which cause problems with the gdb test suite.  For distributions of Insight/gdb, this is not fatal, but it is for the main line of gdb, since you have to have a working test suite for on-going development to be viable.

If there are any others that I have forgotten, we should get them listed for completeness sake...

I agree with you that this is a very important "wrinkle" in Insight that needs to get worked out.  There are, however, some details that you haven't hit yet that need to be fixed before the job can be considered done.

Jim



> From: "Eray 'exa' Ozkural" <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr> 
> Date: Mon Oct 09, 2000  10:32:18 AM US/Pacific 
> To: insight@sources.redhat.com 
> Subject: Re: Packaging insight for debian 
>  
> 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 
>