Re: Stand-Alone Distribution?

[Kai Ruottu <karuottu at freenet dot hut dot fi>]

James Ingham wrote:
>
> Eric Lemings wrote: 
>  > I just downloaded and extracted insight-19991108 and discovered why the
>  > .tar.bz2 file is so huge.  Because it contains several other free
>  > software packages (itcl, tix, tcl, tk, gdb, texinfo, and others?).
>  >
>  > Is there a distribution that contains JUST the insight software and
>  > contains a list of requirements for the other free software packages?
>  > Or can does it all have to be built at once?  In other words, can each
>  > software package be built and installed seperately?
> 
> This has been discussed on this list before.  Turns out that the
> majority of distro besides gdb is in tcl & friends, and we have hacked
> some fixes into these that we haven't yet cleaned up for submission
> back to Scriptics.  We intend to do this at some point, but we also
> want to move up to 8.2 at the same time, and there are some problems -
> building Tcl8.2 on cygwin, Tcl8.2's regular expressions vrs. the gdb
> testsuite, etc... that we will have to solve before we get to this.

 I must agree with Eric...

 Providing the Cygnus-patched tcl/tk-stuff as a separate package would
be much better. Although GCC may need binutils and the C-library (no native
or already built ones earlier), building them every time when one builds GCC
is not necessary, as is seems to be the case with Insight. Or then I haven't
understood something. In my case building some GDBs for Linux, Cygwin and Mingw
hosts from the same sources and under the same Linux host, has caused manual
'make distclean' in the bfd, opcodes, sim and gdb subdirs, and manually editing
the Makefile, between the target changes. And rebuilding the whole stuff again
when the host changes. It is a real nuisance to rebuild all the
tcl/tk/itcl/tix/libgui/texinfo/readline etc. stuff again and again...

 Building the tcl/tk-stuff once, when it has been updated, for every host, and
then building all the Insights for the hosts should be the preferred procedure...

 If the configure could search and use the installed tcl/tk-libs for the hosts,
this would be much better and the 'Insight' could just be included with the normal
GDB distribution. Using '--enable-gdbtk' or something, just as earlier with the
GDBtk-interface, would then be the case.

 The backwards-compatibility of the tcl/tk-runtime libs has been miserable under some
hosts. If the tcl/tk-stuff was a commercial product, perhaps nobody would use it.

 Now I have several GDBs, built by linking against tcl/tk-8.0pl2, which don't work with
the new tcl/tk-8.04 shared libs under Linux. So moving to 8.2 is the last thing I would
do, unless it is guaranteed that all the executables linked against the 8.04 will continue
to work. Building everything from scratch with every new tcl/tk-release isn't very funny.

 Cygwin is just as bad in this 'no-backwards-compatability' respect... Dreaming about
running the installed b19-based executables with b20.1 DLLs seem to be quite vain...

 But I have had no problems running the old Mingw32 stuff, compiled and linked against
the tcl/tk-8.0pl2 import libs (made for mingw32), with the new 8.04 DLLs...

> So, in sum, we can't really make this package right now, but doing so
> is one of our goals for the future.

 If you will change anything, please at least change the naming convention for the DLLs
for the Cygwin-hosted executables!

 Now some DLLs have the 'cyg'-prefix (cygtcl80.dll, cygtk80.dll,...), others don't
have it (tix4180.dll, itk30.dll,...). I remember trying the 8.04 DLLs, prebuilt with
MSC, BCC and mingw32-GCC, with the mingw32-hosted GDBtk's, and they all seemed to
work. But the Cygwin-built DLLs didn't work with these 'native' apps. So putting the
'cyg'-prefix into each one of the Cygwin-built DLLs would be highly recommended...
Otherwise there will be clashes with the native-DLLs using the same name...

 Hmmm, I just checked how the mingw32-hosted Insights worked with the BCC built
8.04 DLLs... Perhaps there are some Cygnus-additions to the the tcl/tk-8.04 sources,
from which the MSC and BCC versions were built (I built the BCC version DLLs myself,
and nothing disables doing it again with the Insight-patched sources...). But they
seemed to work nicely already, just the font size in the pulldown menus was bigger
and the icon in the upper left corner was a 'Tk' instead of the 'Insight-bug'...

Cheers, Kai

PS. My first experiences with two Win3.1/Win32s-hosted Insights (compiled with a liitle
modified mingw32-compiler with support for win32s-DLLs added) are that the source window
opens, all the menus & bitmaps are displayed in the upper part, but the 'status line'
at the bottom part is missing, the pulldown-menus are very wide (first there was only
the pure window, and when I got the pulldowns, they were using greekish fonts!), the
'Help/About' will crash the program etc.  Not very good yet, but after doing some more
editing of the scripts, there can be some expected progress...