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Re: Current Status of Insight


[Apologies for breaking any threading. Thunderbird cannot yet respond to individual mails in a digest! Please CC me in any reply.]

It seems that there is at least 6 people that care:

(in no particular order, and sorry if i list you and you dont really care)

1. Keith Seitz
2. Duane Ellis
3. Roland Schwingel
4. Paul Schlie
5. Christopher Faylor
6. Steven Johnson (me)
And Maybe (although it is less than clear from their posts):
7. Nickolay Kolchin
8. Jon Beniston

Anybody else care to add their name to this list of people that care about, or at the very least use a version of insight and would like to see it continue in some form.

Add my name.


I build Insight/GDB and include it in the WinAVR package:
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/winavr>
Which is a suite of open source cross development tools targetting the AVR and hosted on Windows. Note that one of the previous releases of WinAVR has had over 42,000 downloads.


WinAVR is designed for Windows users, and there are a lot of them where WinAVR is their first exposure to the GNU toolchain. A lot of Windows users prefer to have GUI based tools. Insight is absolutely critical in this area as it may be a users first exposure to using GDB. If they get comfortable with using the Insight interface, then that can lead them to using the power of the CLI interface of raw GDB.

Unfortunately, most of my interest in Insight is as a builder/redistributor, not so much as a developer. But it would be incredibly unfortunate if Insight were to go away. As it is, I've been stuck on building Insight 6.1 (with minimal patches), since there's been no further release tarballs. I have yet to jump into building from CVS HEAD.

My concern with forking the project is, IIUC, the fact that GDB and Insight closely coupled. Keith, anybody, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Insight executable contains all of GDB. It's not like Insight is a separate GUI program that calls a separate GDB program. Unfortunately, one of down sides to having this close coupling is the fact that Insight has not in the past been able to be built as a native Win32 executable without Cygwin. Yes, I saw the recent thread on the gdb list about building gdb for Windows without Cygwin; I'd rather not go over that again. I just want to throw out that there could be advantages about having the GUI decoupled from GDB, especially if forked.

Eric Weddington



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