[Buildroot] [PATCH 2/3] debug: provide an option to copy the gdbserver to the target

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Le Wed, 6 Jun 2012 12:16:54 +0200,
Thomas De Schampheleire <patrickdepinguin+buildroot at gmail.com> a écrit :

> With this change, buildroot will no longer present the option of
> building gdbserver itself. If you have an external toolchain, it is
> now mandatory for it to contain gdbserver (if you want it of course).

Correct.

> I'm not sure if we can always expect this.

I would say it is the case for most external toolchains that exist
today, so it sounds like (at least to me) like a reasonable solution.

> In my case, gdb was built by the toolchain, and gdbserver by
> buildroot. For me it makes sense to follow your strategy and have
> gdbserver built by crosstool-ng instead (and use that as custom
> external toolchain).

Building gdb and gdbserver separately is, IMO, a recipe for disaster.
Even though the gdb remote protocol is supposed to be stable, my
experience is that using a different version for gdb and gdbserver
often causes problems.

> But maybe there are cases where custom external toolchains do not
> contain gdbserver already, and the user would like buildroot to build
> it? In that case, we could consider changing the depend line to:
> depends on BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_CUSTOM || !BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL
> 
> What do you think? Should we cater for this?

Do you have a practical usage for this?

Generally speaking, I'd prefer if we handle really useful use cases,
and to not complexify Buildroot with hypothetic and complex use cases.

Regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux
development, consulting, training and support.
http://free-electrons.com