[lug] insight as gdb frontend?

Tom Tromey tromey at redhat.com
Fri Apr 13 10:59:03 MDT 2001


>>>>> "Scott" == Scott A Herod <herod at interact-tv.com> writes:

Scott>   Any thoughts about Insight <http://sources.redhat.com/insight/>
Scott> as a frontend to gdb?  I'm a bit nervous about going to the effort
Scott> to fix the installation since I'm hitting a bug that's been open
Scott> for at least 4 months.  ( I'm glad I wasn't doing an install into
Scott> /usr rather than /usr/local.  I'd be really upset if gdb had been
Scott> broken. )  Maybe the CVS code has been corrected.

I've hacked on and used Insight.

It is ok.  Some things it does very nicely.  Overall it seems fast
enough.  When debugging unfamiliar code I tend to use it instead of
the command-line gdb.  (When debugging familiar code I tend to use the
command line gdb or gdb in Emacs.)

Sometimes Insight crashes.  But then, I've noticed that recently gdb
crashes a lot too, so it is hard to attribute the crashes to Insight
per se.  In particular there are problems if you rebuild the inferior
and then re-run it, especially when you have breakpoints in shared
libraries.

I might see more problems since I tend to use the cvs gdb.

BTW, a word of advice: don't ever configure programs with
--prefix=/usr.  That way lies madness.  My preferred way to build is
to make a new install directory for every program.  Then I can simply
`rm -rf' the hierarchy if it isn't working out.  Of course, I also
tend to have 3 or 4 gcc installations and 2 gdb installations at any
given time; I doubt my needs are typical.

Tom



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