Re: Isn't Insight a little bloated?

[Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>]

   From: Toby Hutton <toby@hutton.org>
   Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 22:45:00 +1000 (EST)

   I haven't actually managed to build Insight yet for a couple of
   reasons.

   Fristly, I'm running FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE and have learned that gdb-4.18
   doesn't build 'out of the box'.  The FreeBSD core maintainers have
   taken the source, started a collection of their own patches and have
   incorporated it into the 'world' build process with their own
   makefiles.  Why these patches haven't been folded back into the proper
   distro is beyond me.

Combination of apathy and laziness usually. :-)  Sometimes there are
political/technical disagreements; for instance, the FSF insists that
it have clear ownership of all code in GNU, while *BSD and Linux folks
casually add patches whether or not it's legal for them to do it.

I have a background task to track down wandering GDB patches, FreeBSD
was on my list to investigate further...

   Personally, I'm looking for gdb with better source and watch
   listings.  ie.  I love the readline interface to gdb, tab completion,
   etc. and don't like the mouse.  But gdb's 'list' is really lacking.
   Frontends like DDD are too mouse oriented and busy.  So, Insight
   sounds great if it wasn't so cludgy to build.   Sigh.

Jim addressed technical points, I'll add a cultural one.  Although
this code has been heavily used at Cygnus and by Cygnus customers,
this is the first time it's been available to the net; so there are
going to be lots of things that we did for our own convenience,
without a net community looking over our shoulders and saying "hey,
waitaminnit".  The situation is a little like Mozilla's, except that
we didn't have to remove the profanities! :-)

Anyway, I'm very keen to make Insight more interesting to the net
community, and want to do whatever we can to make it easier to build
it from sources.  Feel free to send FreeBSD patches, configure/make
transcripts, whatever - since by definition we only have a Cygnus
environment here, we must rely on everybody else to tell us what needs
to be fixed to make Insight build and run on various systems.

								Stan