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Re: Add support for --with-system-gdbinit


> Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:56:19 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> Cc: Jerome Guitton <guitton@adacore.com>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> 
> The path will be automatically relocated if the GDB binary is moved,
> so it can be used for a system-wide directory like /etc or a
> prefixed directory like /opt/vendor/share.

Sorry, I don't understand: what does this mean?  How does one
``relocate a path''?

> Eli, is the doc patch OK?

The doc patch doesn't really say anything useful:

>  @item
>  @cindex init file
> +Reads the system-wide @dfn{init file} (if @option{--with-system-gdbinit} was
> +used when building @value{GDBN}) and executes all the commands in that file.

That's it!  We don't tell what is the name of the file, we don't tell
how to find it, we just tell it _might_ exist and it _might_ be read
by GDB at startup.  That doesn't sound very user-friendly to me.
Contrast that with what the Emacs manual says about site-start.el,
which AFAIU has a similar purpose.

Am I missing something?

At the very least we should have some command-line option (perhaps as
part of "--help") to show where this file should live and what's its
name, and we should describe that right next to the above text.  We
shouldn't assume that the user is the same person who built GDB in the
first place.

Also, doesn't the relocation of the file (whatever it may mean)
warrant some documentation as well?  Assuming I'm a sysadmin who needs
to set up such a site-wide init file, don't I need to know something
else besides what you wrote?


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