[PATCH] gdb: Allow more control over where to find python libraries

[Simon Marchi]

On 2020-02-06 11:46 a.m., Andrew Burgess wrote:
> The motivation behind this commit is to make it easier to bundle the
> Python libraries with GDB when linking GDB against a static
> libpython, the Python libraries will be manually added into the GDB
> installation tree, and GDB should be able to find them at run-time.
> The installation tree will look like this:
> 
>   .
>   |-- bin/
>   |-- include/
>   |-- lib/
>   |   `-- python3.8/
>   `-- share/
> 
> The benefit here is that the entire installation tree can be bundled
> into a single archive and copied to another machine with a different
> version of Python installed, and GDB will still work, including its
> Python support.

For those who might be wondering, like me: isn't the goal of linking
statically with the lib to avoid having an external library?  This
patch actually deals with finding the .py files provided by the Python
standard library, not the native code.  The native code is indeed
linked statically inside the gdb executable.

I won't pretend to understand in details what's happening with the Python
detection in configure (I find it's quite messy), but I didn't spot anything
wrong with your patch, and it seems to address a valid use case, so I'm not
against it.

Simon