[Rd] Problem installing gdb into Rtools42

[Tomas Kalibera]

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didn't show the context) that you have installed gdb to an outdated 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
>
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]