Retiring in-tree GDB

[Bryan Drewery]

On 10/20/2015 2:51 PM, Ian Lepore wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-10-20 at 14:25 -0700, Bryan Drewery wrote:
>> On 10/20/2015 1:36 PM, John Baldwin wrote:
>>> However, I would like to propose that we retire the in-tree GDB for
>>> some of
>>> our platforms (namely x86) for 11.  In particular, I think we
>>> should default
>>
>> Disabling/removing gdb. Definitely. It is unusable in many cases and
>> the
>> working gdb is just a 'pkg install' away.
>>
>>> to enabling lldb and disabling gdb for platforms that meet the
>>> following
>>
>> Why should we include lldb in the base system? It is not needed to
>> build
>> or use the system and we can easily provide one from packages.
>>
>> Arguments about providing a default working system don't work here
>> for
>> me as we don't provide perl, python, valgrind, vim, emacs, X11, etc. 
>>  We
>> can provide lldb and gdb on the default DVD though.
>>
>> If we are actually going to "package base" in 11, we should not be
>> adding new things into base that can easily live in ports. Yes, I
>> know
>> lldb is already there but I don't think it should be.
>>
>> Can the same be said for tools such as truss, ktrace or nvi? Sure.
>> The
>> discussion is really "what packages should be installed by default".
>> The answer should be "what all, or most, users _need_" Do most users
>> need a debugger? I don't think so.
>>
>>> criteria:
>>>
>>> 1) devel/gdb works including thread and kgdb support
>>> 2) lldb works
> 
> This just-won't-die meme that a "functional system" is nothing more
> than a bare kernel and an init binary and everything else comes from
> ports is extra-scary when you consider that ports can't even be (cross
> -)built for some architectures.
> 
> It sucks that the project is adopting the mindset that the only way to
> compete with linux is to become linux.  (And it sucks that installing a
> truly functional system will require end users to have roughly the same
> knowledge as the team that assembles a linux distro.)

It's not about Linux. It's about not providing the same thing twice on
the system. It's about not having 2 different compilers on the system.
Using ports on older releases means the base compiler is too outdated to
build from ports and is thus not used. We have so much redundancy before
/usr and /usr/local once you install packages or try to build from
ports. There's no sane reason for that.

In a world of a packaged base the default install should still mostly
match what we have now for POLA. Just that it is contained in packages.
My point here is that removing something is argument #1, adding
something is argument #2.

No one is seriously suggesting we provide a DVD with init, libc, rtld,
libthr and a kernel only. That may be "a package" which is considered
very critical and special, but it would be among many other packages.

Yes we need cross-compiling in ports. We also need more native build
servers in the cluster to provide packages.


-- 
Regards,
Bryan Drewery

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