Re: Is the project still alive ?

Keith Seitz <[email protected]> Wed, 25 Jun 2014 15:51:49 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.comp.debugging.insight
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi, Patrick,

I wish I had an answer for you, but I don't.

I've been struggling with this very question for about a year now. It 
isn't really clear to me that EOLing Insight would affect more than a 
handful of people, and there are alternatives out there (Nemevier, 
Eclipse-based standalone, QtCreator, Code::Blocks, ...).

Red Hat is no longer using Insight, and, as you correctly state, my time 
and paycheck go to working on different projects. Contributions are 
(very) few and (very) far between.

A GIT repository exists, but I have not yet pushed it to sourceware. 
When I last played with this, I wasn't very pleased by the direction it 
was going. It was essentially a clone of the gdb repo with the 
insight/libgui bits thrown in. Yuck. [If anyone has any better ideas, 
I'm all eyes/ears.]

At one time, my immediate for goal for the project was a slight/small 
"reboot":
1) create GIT repo [created, not published, not happy with it]
2) NO in-tree Tcl, Tk, Itcl, Itk, iwidgets, etc. All must be provided by 
the platform [or maybe on an auxiliary branch?]
3) Remove dependency on/prune libgui [TkTable is particularly troubling]
4) Linux-only first "release"; cygwin using X and mingw to follow
5) Remove all the Foundry/Code Fusion junk from the tree and 
simplify/audit the codebase.
6) Formalize and make "regular" snapshots/updates/releases

I've toyed with jumping straight to a rewrite based on Tom Tromey's 
python-based efforts, but it is still unclear whether that would work 
well (enough?) on all the platforms I care about (Linux, MinGW, Cygwin). 
That notwithstanding, I had convinced myself that I would need a 
stop-gap solution until a rewrite was sufficiently advanced to be useful.

In the end, a part of me still believes that there is an audience for 
Insight or something insight-like, i.e., a lightweight, *fast*, non-MI 
GUI for gdb.

Keith

PS. This note has reminded me that I really should install F21 and see 
where that's headed... /me installs rawhide