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

[Mo DeJong <mdejong at cygnus dot com>]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Jim Ingham wrote:

> > 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?
> 
> But, in fact, insight IS a COMPLETE copy of gdb.  If you have it,
> there is no reason for another copy of gdb.  So you need to make
> it easy to use the same binary for gdb command-line & gdb with
> the Tk bits thrown in.

Yes, yes, it also supports gdb, but at its core it is a GUI for gdb.
Running "insight -nw" for command line gdb does not seem all
that difficult to me.

> > 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).
> 
> I disagree.  Why would you want to introduce the confusion of
> shipping two potentially different gdb's.  Insight is a complete
> fully featured command line debugger, as well as a complete,
> fully featured GUI debugger.  No other copy is necessary, and
> the support costs of "How do I start Insight" are trivial
> compared to sorting out which of the two versions of gdb
> on the system were actually used...

You think there is no confusion involved in taking over the
name of a well known command and replacing it with the GUI
tool? While I would agree that shipping two versions of
gdb on a distro is none too good, it is better than
not including Insight because it conflicts with the
existing gdb install (which is our current situation).
There are also lots of folks that would want to install
Insight on an existing system. Do we tell those
folks it is not possible to install Insight unless
they first un-install the existing gdb RPM?

Also, for every one person who writes in with a
"How do I run Insight" question, there are 10
more who could not figure it out and just
gave up.

> > Insight is a lot bigger than command line gdb.
> 
> This must be wrong.  I bet the one in /home/mo has debugging symbols
> still in it, and the one in /usr/bin/gdb is stripped.  No way Insight is 
> that much bigger than gdb, even if you include the Tcl/Tk/Tix libraries
> (which ought to be shared, but I don't think we ship it that way) I 
> don't think you get an extra 7.5 meg.  And the GUI related code is
> gdb is not all that much...

Oh, yeah you are probably right. Insight would still be a meg or two
bigger since Tcl/Tk is not all that small. Don't forget all the
extra files that Tcl/Tk needs on disk too, executable size is
not the only concern.

Mo DeJong
Red Hat Inc