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

[Mo DeJong <mdejong at cygnus dot com>]

> 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?

> 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).

> 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.

 
> 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.
> 
> 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.

Mo DeJong
Red Hat Inc