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Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:33:15 -0400
From: Charles Wilson <cygwin AT cwilson DOT fastmail DOT fm>
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Subject: Re: Does anyone use insight on cygwin?
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Christopher Faylor wrote:
> Does anyone actually use insight on Cygwin? 

I do. I am a complete idiot when it comes to using gdb in "normal" mode. 
Without insight, I'm lost.

> Keith Seitz, the insight
> maintainer, has recently made changes which will allow insight to work
> with a non-special version of tcl/tk rather than the hacked version that
> it had previously been built with.  That opens the door to building a
> real version of tcl/tk for cygwin and linking insight to it.
> Unfortunately, I believe that would mean that insight would need to run
> in an X window rather than natively.

Not a problem for me; I don't mind running an Xserver. And I routinely 
run both cygwin's very old Xserver and the 'free' XMing version.


However, I remember this issue came up several years ago. There were a 
few arguments in favor of the hacked tcl/tk version of insight:

(1) How do you debug the Xserver if your debugger depends on it?

Of course, there is nobody currently trying to debug the Xserver on 
cygwin -- or develop it in any way -- so that's most likely a moot 
point. And besides, this same issue faces *nix developers: there are 
ways around it. For instance, use a stable Xserver on a different 
display, and run insight on that display to debug the unstable target 
Xserver (or a program running on that Xserver).


(2) Red Hat's paying customers expected a standalone debugger, and would 
balk at a Xserver requirement.

This is even more true now, I would imagine, as cygwin-xfree has been 
all-but-dead for years. (What? Your debugger requires an Xserver, but 
you don't provide a current one?)  Hopefully some of these problems will 
soon improve, at least on the X-library, if not X-server, side -- 
</raises beer vaguely in Yaakov's direction>

OTOH, maybe Red Hat is now providing a different graphical debugger to 
its embedded customers -- one that uses the MI interface to gdb 
directly. Like, say, Eclipse does -- and therefore their customers may 
no longer care about insight. Maybe. I dunno.


Also, this may impact the ability to do 
error_start=X:\somewhere\insight.exe -- but that's probably not a big deal.

> The other alternative is to nuke insight entirely.  Is anyone really
> relying on it?  Since I barely test it when I release gdb, I'd expect
> that there would be problem reports but I don't remember seeing any for
> quite some time.

That's 'cause it works. <g>

I could certainly see splitting the distribution into two packages. This 
means that 'gdb -w' would fail in strange and wonderful ways if the 
"insight" package with all of its tcl scripts were not installed, 
but...maybe that's okay.

--
Chuck

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