FAQ

							Section I General Information

1. What is CGDB?
	CGDB is a curses-based interface to the GNU Debugger (GDB).
	The goal of CGDB is to be lightweight and responsive; not encumbered with 
	unnecessary features. The interface is designed to deliver the familiar 
	GDB text interface, with a split screen showing the source as it executes. 
	The UI is modeled on the classic Unix text editor, vi. Those familiar with 
	vi should feel right at home using CGDB.

2. Where can I get CGDB?
	The CGDB project is hosted on http://sourceforge.net/. You can view the 
	project by going to http://sourceforge.net/projects/cgdb/. Alternatively, 
	CGDB's home-page is at http://cgdb.sourceforge.net/.

3. What OS does CGDB work on?
	CGDB is used daily on
		Linux 2.4.18
		Cygwin 1.3.22 (NT,2000,XP)
		Solaris 5.7,5.8,5.9

	it has been reported to work on 
	 	AIX
		FreeBSD
		NetBSD
		and more

	If you have ported or just got CGDB to compile on another OS,
	please let us know.

							Section II Installing CGDB

1. How do I install CGDB?
	CGDB can be installed by compiling it from sources. Goto CGDB's home 
	page to get them. Also, there is binary release's of CGDB for different
	distrobutions.

	Look at http://cgdb.sourceforge.net/download.shtml for more information.

2. What dependencies does CGDB have?
	CGDB could not have been written without the use of other libraries.
	1. CGDB depends on readline-development-5.1 or greater.
	   If you don't have this, you might get a link error that looks something
	   like this, 'undefined symbol, rl_set_prompt'.
	2. CGDB depends on ncurses/curses.  The version number is not known.
	   I have used libncurses.so.5 successfully.
	3. If you decide to modify the tokenizer library or the config
	   file module, you will need to have flex installed.
	   I have used flex 2.5.4 to build CGDB.
	4. CGDB uses autoconf/automake to build its configure scripts and 
	   makefiles. At the time of this writing, CGDB was using
          * aclocal  (GNU automake)   1.9.5
          * autoconf (GNU Autoconf)   2.59
          * m4       (GNU m4)         1.4.3

							Section III Problems

1. Why do some keys not work properly for me in CGDB?
	CGDB is proud of its custom key input library. This is because
	it *can* use the ESC key, without having problems understanding
	escape sequences that are generated when certain keys are hit.
	Some of the keys that generate escape sequences are the arrow keys,
	page up, page down, insert, delete, home, end and all the function
	keys.

	If you have problems using any of the keys above, you should modify 
	the value of escdelay. Please look at the README file for more 
	information on escdelay.

2. Why does CGDB not work when a tty can not be opened?
    There are 2 problems with this. 
	
	a) The annotate 2 communication protocol used between CGDB and GDB is 
	lacking. It is difficult ( at best ) to figure out which output is GDB 
	and which output is the inferior program. It is impossible to send input 
	to the inferior program without error.
	
	To solve this CGDB used the tty command to be able to allow the user to send 
	data to the inferior program. It also can easily determine which data is 
	from the inferior and which data is from GDB.
	
	b) Readline can not be used if there is no tty available.

	All in all, not allowing CGDB to work when there is no tty is a bug. In
	the future, when CGDB will work when no tty is available, there will be
	several features that do not work.
		1) No sending input to the inferior program. The work around is to 
		start the program from the terminal and attach to it using GDB.
		2) Readline will not work.

							Section IV Using CGDB

1. How do I automate colon commands using the cgdbrc file?
	CGDB looks at the file $HOME/.cgdb/cgdbrc. It executes each of the lines
	in that file in order as if they were typed into the status bar. This is
	a very useful way of automating commands.