Re: Improve GDB's first user experience by reducing "print_gdb_version" output

On 5/28/25 4:44 AM, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 05:38:57PM -0400, Paul Smith via Gdb wrote:
>> On Tue, 2025-05-27 at 17:43 -0300, Guinevere Larsen via Gdb wrote:
>>> I'm sending this here in case there is some rule that forces us to
>>> write the copyright or free software status at initialization, before
>>> spending the time to turn this into a patch.
>> I had remembered that interactive programs should generate copyright
>> information at startup, but the most I can find in the current GNU
>> Maintainer's manual is
> The GPL itself contains the recommendation at the end (after the
> actual terms and conditions) in the section "How to Apply These Terms
> to Your New Programs". It is even shorter than Guinevere's suggestion,
> it recommends outputting just 4 lines:

While shorter than my suggestion, it doesn't add any of the helpful 
things that a new user would want to know about GDB specifically, so we 
would need a couple more lines anyway.

Considering that the license says "output a short notice *like* this" 
(emphasis mine), I would imagine we can alter it without trouble. In 
fact, on a first invocation of emacs, I'm greeted with only a screen 
that looks very different to that message, starting by welcoming users, 
offering a tutorial, a guided tour and a link to the manual before 
mentioning copyright or warranty, which is much friendlier to someone 
attempting to learn to use it on their own.

-- 
Cheers,
Guinevere Larsen
She/Her/Hers

>
>    If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short
>    notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:
>
>      <program>  Copyright (C) <year>  <name of author>
>      This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.
>      This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
>      under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.
>
>    The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the
>    appropriate parts of the General Public License.  Of course, your
>    program's commands might be different; for a GUI interface, you
>    would use an "about box".
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark
>