Re: INSIGHT: with GNU cross-compilers.

[Brendan Simon <brendan@dgs.monash.edu.au>]

Stan Shebs wrote:

> What are the DDD features you would most like to see in Insight??

Well I have not used it very much.  I mainly used it for a look see.  I
couldn't use it to talk to my BDM (Wiggler) with Linux so I put it aside.  I
will try to remember the things I really liked.

1) The command window and source windows could be seperate or one window with
many adjustable dividers (I can't remember the correct GUI/Widget name for
it).

2) Placing the mouse pointer over variables would bring up a little tooltip
style box with the value of the variable.  Great for inspecting the odd
variable quickly.

3) the --debugger command line option allows selection of different
debuggers.  I have used "ddd --debugger powerpc-rtems-gdb", etc.  The default
is to use gdb.  I'm not sure if DDD has any debugger built into the code or
whether it is just a front end to debuggers.  I would guess it is just a
GUI front end which makes sence to me.  I would like to see Insight head
along these lines.  As I understand it. gdb is "built in" to Insight so the
only available targets are what was selected at build time.


> Insight's first public demo (ESC '97) was for Windows x powerpc-eabi
> target, and it ships regularly with Cygnus powerpc-eabi releases, so
> it's pretty likely to work... :-)

Sounds great, but I get the feeling that you have to compile/build different
versions of Insight for different targets.  I would like to see a generic
front end.  Then again, I remember some talk on the gdb list for gdb to cater
for multiple target architectures (eg. m68k, i386, powercp, etc).  I'm not
sure what the state of this is but if it is working then I guess Insight will
support all these at once.

Can I get a binary of Insight that will run on a MS-Windows host and target a
powerpc-eabi environment via the Wiggler BDM ?  If so, where can I download
it.


> Even better, the target dialog is complete enough to let you do all
> the connection/download setup without typing any commands at all!

Fantastic.  I think Insight is going to do wonderfull things for GDB and the
entire GNU toolchain.


Brendan Simon.