[Rd] Problem installing gdb into Rtools42

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 1/18/23 19:41, Dominick Samperi wrote:
> Thanks for the detailed feedback Tomas,
>
> I ran the command 'pacman -Syuu' again, just to be sure, and this time 
> it says "there is nothing to do."
>
> It appears that gdb is working. I was spooked by the diagnostics that 
> you say is a known (not serious) issue.
>
> My mistake was not setting a breakpoint on main, so I confused 
> problems with gdb with problems with the program I'm trying to debug!
I am glad it works now for you. Please don't forget to include debug 
info (for R or packages, depending on what you need to debug).
>
> Incidentally, my remark about mingw-w64 problems in other communities 
> alluded to the Haskell development
> community, where an ABI incompatibility was discovered about a year 
> ago. It is discussed by Ben Gamari here
> https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/19945.

 From a quick look it seems to be an incompatibility between two 
libraries implementing POSIX regular expressions, essentially a name 
clash, they just need to make sure to consistently use one of them. It 
is not a problem of MinGW-W64.

Tomas

>
> Dominick
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 12:56 PM Tomas Kalibera 
> <tomas.kalibera using gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     On 1/18/23 17:39, Dominick Samperi wrote:
>>     Thanks,
>>
>>     But this didn't work. It installs msys2 along with lots of other
>>     stuff, and gdb would not start as before (missing DLL's).
>>
>>     Then I tried to run the command you suggested again, and there
>>     was a warning from the package manager about a cycle detected,
>>     but now gdb starts with the following messages...
>
>     Well, so it did work in the end. You didn't share what was the
>     output from the command the first and second time around. Actually
>     you have even deleted the command from the thread, so now nobody
>     can see it (it was "pacman -Syuu").
>
>     In principle, sometimes one has to re-run the update the second
>     time when the runtime needs to be updated, and the output says
>     that in that case. This is because you are updating Msys2 from
>     Msys2 itself. These things are harder on Windows due to file
>     locking, hence the need for re-running this.
>
>     What happened is probably (but again, I have to be guessing as you
>     didn't show the context) that you have installed gdb to an
>     outdated Msys2 installation, getting a new version of gdb
>     depending on some new runtime shared libraries. By updating Msys2,
>     you got the new shared libraries gdb needed and you could run it.
>
>>
>>     Traceback (most recent call last):
>>       File "<string>", ine 3, in <module>
>>     ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'libstdcxx'
>>     /etc/gdbinit:5: Error in sourced command file:
>>     Error while executing Python code.
>
>     It is safe and best to ignore this. It is a bug in Msys2 which has
>     been reported.
>     https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/2923
>
>     Please also note it is documented in
>     https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/howto-R-4.2.html
>     (see Additional debugging hints)
>
>>
>>     There is also a line...
>>
>>     This GDB was configured as "x86_64_pc-msys".
>>
>>     (Shouldn't that be msys2?)
>
>     No. Msys2 is the name for the whole project. "msys" is the name of
>     one of subsystem, one which uses the msys (cygwin) runtime. It is
>     not necessary to understand these details for using
>     Msys2/Rtools42, but if you are still interested to know more,
>     please refer to Msys2 documentation.
>
>>     If I ignore the messages and try to debug a terminal application,
>>     there are messages
>>     stating that multiple threads are started, and the application
>>     accepts no keyboard
>>     input, and ultimately must be terminated by closing the window.
>     Please really you need to show more context to get help. I am
>     using this every day and it works for me, as well as for other
>     people. Also, please read the documentation especially if you are
>     running into problems:
>
>     https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/howto-R-4.2.html
>     https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/howto-R-devel.html
>
>     Problems with keyboard input are probably related to which
>     terminal you are using. In some terminals, you would have to use
>     winpty (run gdb with winpty) for line editing to work. Please see
>     "Additional debugging hints" in the documentation.
>
>     In a clean, updated install of Rtools42, with gdb installed as
>     documented, no additional tweaks are needed to run gdb from the
>     "Rtools42 bash" (mintty terminal running bash from Msys2).
>
>>     It appears there are other development communities negatively
>>     impacted by
>>     the fork to mingw-w64. This did not go smoothly.
>
>     I don't understand what you mean. As far as I know, R has been
>     using MinGW-W64 (and before that MinGW) from the beginning,
>     certainly it has been using MinGW-W64 for many years now. The
>     official builds never used MSVC, there was no switching to
>     MinGW/MinGW-W64 in the case of R afair, at least not in the recent
>     past.
>
>     But, in either case, the choice of MinGW-W64 is orthogonal to the
>     choice of Msys2 as the provider of the build tools. Rtools42/43
>     come also in a compiler toolchain+libraries bundle, without Msys2,
>     which in theory you could use with a different set of build tools.
>     But you would be on your own to figure out the details.
>
>>
>>     Perhaps it would be safer to simply provide a version of Rtools42
>>     that comes with
>>     gdb and msys2?
>
>     Rtools42 comes with Msys2. gdb is not installed there by default,
>     because most people don't need it, but it is documented how to
>     install it. I've now updated the documentation to always remind to
>     update the system before installing any Msys2 packages.
>
>     Tomas
>
>>
>>     Dominick
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 2:40 AM Tomas Kalibera
>>     <tomas.kalibera using gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>         On 1/18/23 04:33, Dominick Samperi wrote:
>>         > Hello,
>>         >
>>         > I tried installing gdb into Rtools42 following the
>>         instructions here
>>         > https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/howto-R-4.2.html
>>         >
>>         > I ran 'pacman -Sy gdb', and the installation seemed to
>>         complete without
>>         > problems.
>>         >
>>         > But gdb could not be started because incorrect DLL versions
>>         were installed,
>>         > in particular, the missing DLL's are: msys-ffi-8.dll and
>>         > msys-unistring-5.dll.
>>
>>         Try upgrading Msys2 using
>>
>>         pacman -Syuu
>>
>>         Tomas
>>
>>         > Is there an alternative way to install gdb for use with
>>         Rtool42?
>>         >
>>         > Thanks,
>>         > Dominick
>>         >
>>         >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>         >
>>         > ______________________________________________
>>         > R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>>         > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
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